Musk demanded proof people died from USAID cuts. He got it — and lost it.

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Musk demanded proof people died from USAID cuts. He got it — and lost it.<br>Judd Legum<br>Jul 03, 2026

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Remnants of signage for the US Agency for International Development (USAID) on the facade of the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center in Washington, DC, on December 29, 2025. (Photo by Brendan SMIALOWSKI / AFP via Getty Images)<br>Elon Musk challenged critics last week to name anyone who has died as a result of the funding cuts he led at the US Agency for International Development (USAID) last year.<br>“There is not even a single dead child!” the world’s richest man insisted on X. “They cannot cite a single name of someone who died out of the ‘millions’ they falsely claim have died,” he added in another post.<br>In response, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nicholas Kristof, who visited parts of Africa to report on the aid cuts, listed the names of numerous people in the region who died after losing access to health care funded by USAID, including multiple children.<br>@elonmusk Elon, I can give you many, many names of people who have died because of your aid cuts.:\n*Yamah Freeman was a 23-year-old woman who died in childbirth because you stopped paying for the diesel for ambulances in her part of Liberia. I talked to her parents and sister in their","username":"NickKristof","name":"Nicholas Kristof","profile_image_url":"https://pbs.substack.com/profile_images/1453381583847657473/77brYR0Q_normal.png","date":"2026-06-29T01:15:08.000Z","photos":[],"quoted_tweet":{},"reply_count":3099,"retweet_count":3658,"like_count":18897,"impression_count":2597432,"expanded_url":null,"video_url":null,"belowTheFold":false}" class="pencraft pc-display-flex pc-flexDirection-column pc-gap-12 pc-padding-16 pc-reset bg-primary-zk6FDl outline-detail-vcQLyr pc-borderRadius-md sizing-border-box-DggLA4 pressable-lg-kV7yq8 font-text-qe4AeH tweet-fWkQfo twitter-embed">

Nicholas Kristof@NickKristof

@elonmusk Elon, I can give you many, many names of people who have died because of your aid cuts.:<br>*Yamah Freeman was a 23-year-old woman who died in childbirth because you stopped paying for the diesel for ambulances in her part of Liberia. I talked to her parents and sister in their<br>1:15 AM · Jun 29, 2026 · 2.6M Views

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Musk replied with a multi-post tantrum, calling Kristof “utterly evil” and a “piece of shit and liar” who is “lying through his teeth.” He also called another researcher, Alonso Gurmendi, “a piece of shit who loves murder” after Gurmendi mentioned a 10-year-old child in South Sudan who died after being cut off from his HIV medication.<br>Kristof has stood by his reporting, publishing a column in the New York Times on Wednesday that included the names of people whose deaths he had learned about while in Africa last year.<br>Jibia was a 10-year-old girl, ranking third out of 58 students in her fourth-grade class in Rwamwanja, Uganda. Aid cuts meant that the local clinic ran out of $2 bed nets to protect from mosquitoes, as well as anti-malaria medicines. Jibia died of malaria last July, her mother told me outside the family home…<br>Achol Deng, 8, had been infected with H.I.V. at birth in South Sudan but had been kept alive by American-provided medicines costing just 12 cents a day. The dismantling of U.S.A.I.D. and the resulting chaos meant that she lost her caseworker and access to medicines, and soon died of an opportunistic infection, health workers told me.<br>I could keep going. A Boston University researcher estimated that the aid cuts have cost more than 750,000 lives worldwide. A study published in the Lancet, the British medical journal, forecast that at present rates, the aid defunding will cost 9.4 million lives by 2030.

He also requested that Musk join him on a reporting trip to Africa. “We’ll talk to these moms and dads, and you’ll see the dying children themselves,” Kristof wrote in a post tagging Musk on X. “I think if you see the kids whose lives are at stake, maybe you’ll change your mind.”<br>In February of last year, as Musk was leading the White House’s Department of Government Efficiency initiative, he bragged on X about spending a weekend “feeding USAID into the wood chipper.” He added that he could have “gone to some great parties” but chose to do “that instead.”<br>This Week in Musk:<br>Musk has been ordered to testify under oath in a pair of proposed class-action fraud lawsuits stemming from the $1 million-a-day giveaway that he and his pro-Trump PAC launched ahead of the 2024 election. Magistrate Judge Susan Hightower also recommended that Musk and America PAC face a claim that they used the giveaway to deceive voters into handing over personal information. Plaintiffs in the lawsuits claim they were deceived into believing the winners of the $1 million would be chosen at random. They cited comments from one of Musk’s lawyers, who acknowledged that winners were...