In April, Ezibon Khamis was dispatched to Akobo, South Sudan, to doc the horrors as humanitarian companies collapsed in the course of a cholera outbreak. As a consultant of the NGO Save the Kids, Khamis would be capable of present the implications of huge cuts to U.S. overseas help made by the Division of Authorities Effectivity and the State Division. Seven of the well being services that Save the Kids had supported within the area have absolutely closed, and 20 extra have partly ceased operations.
Khamis instructed us about passing women and men who carried the sick on their shoulders like pallbearers. Kids and adults had been laid on makeshift gurneys; many vomited uncontrollably. These human caravans walked for hours in as much as 104-degree warmth in an try to achieve medical remedy, as a result of their native clinics had both closed utterly or run out of how to deal with cholera. Beforehand, the U.S. authorities had supplied tablets that purified the water within the area, which is house to a quarter-million individuals, a lot of whom are fleeing violent conflicts close by. Not anymore, Khamis says; now many have resorted to consuming untreated river water. He instructed us that at the least eight individuals—5 of them youngsters—had died on their journey that day. As he entered a well being facility in Akobo, he was confronted by a girl. “She simply mentioned, ‘You deserted us,’” Khamis instructed us.
We heard different such tales in our effort to raised perceive what occurred when DOGE dismantled the US Company for Worldwide Growth. In Nigeria, a mom watched one in all her toddler twins die after this system that had been treating them for extreme acute malnutrition shut down. In South Sudan, unaccompanied youngsters had been unable to reunite with surviving relations at three refugee camps, as a consequence of different cuts. Allara Ali, a coordinator for Medical doctors With out Borders who oversees the group’s work at Bay Regional Hospital, in Somalia, instructed us that youngsters are arriving there so acutely malnourished and “deteriorated” that they can’t converse—a results of emergency-feeding facilities not receiving funds from USAID to offer fortified milks and pastes. Fifty % of the kids with extreme acute malnutrition are dying throughout the first two days of admission at Bay Regional, Medical doctors With out Borders wrote to us. Many moms who journey greater than 100 miles in order that a physician would possibly see their baby return house with out them.
One man has persistently cheered and helped execute the funding cuts which have exacerbated struggling and dying. In February, Elon Musk, performing in his capability as a pacesetter of DOGE, declared that USAID was “a felony group,” argued that it was “time for it to die,” and bragged that he’d “spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wooden chipper.”
Musk didn’t reply to a number of requests for remark for this text. Final month, in an interview with Bloomberg, he argued that his critics have been unable to provide any proof that these cuts at USAID have resulted in any actual struggling. “It’s false,” he mentioned. “I say, ‘Nicely, please join us with this group of kids so we will discuss to them and perceive extra about their concern,’ we get nothing. They don’t even attempt to provide you with a present orphan.”
Musk is improper, as our reporting reveals—and as a number of different experiences (and estimates) have additionally proven. However the concern right here is not only that Musk is improper. It’s that his indifference to the struggling of individuals in Africa exists alongside his perception that he has a central function to play in the way forward for the human species. Musk has insisted that individuals should have as many youngsters as doable—and is dedicated to siring a “legion” himself—and that we should turn into multiplanetary. Maybe greater than anybody else on Earth, Musk, the wealthiest man alive, has the drive, the assets, and the connections to make his moon pictures a actuality. His biggest and most constant ambition is to outline a brand new period for humankind. Who does he imagine is worthy of that future?
For greater than 20 years, Musk has been fixated on colonizing Mars. That is the explanation he based his rocket firm, SpaceX; Musk just lately proclaimed that its Starship program—an effort to create reusable rockets that he believes will ultimately carry maybe hundreds of thousands of people to the Purple Planet—is “the important thing branching level for human future or future of consciousness as an entire.” This civilizational language is widespread—he’s additionally described his Mars ambitions as “life insurance coverage for all times collectively.”
He claims to be philosophically aligned with longtermism, a futurist philosophy whose proponents—self-styled rationalists—sport out the way to do probably the most good for the human race over the longest time horizon. Traditional pillars of longtermism are guarding towards future pandemics and addressing issues about correctly calibrating synthetic intelligence, all with a deal with defending future generations from theoretical threats. Musk’s Mars obsession purports to observe this logic: An funding in a program that enables people to stay on different planets would, in principle, be certain that the human race survives even when the Earth turns into uninhabitable. Musk has endorsed the work of at the least one longtermist who believes that this achievement would equate to trillions of lives saved within the type of people who would in any other case not be born.
Saving the lives of theoretical future youngsters seems to be of explicit curiosity to Musk. On X and in interviews, he constantly fixates on declining start charges. “The start fee may be very low in nearly each nation. And so until that adjustments, civilization will disappear,” Musk instructed Fox Information’s Bret Baier earlier this yr. “Humanity is dying.” He himself has fathered many youngsters—14 that we all know of—with a number of ladies. Musk’s basis has additionally donated cash to fund inhabitants analysis on the College of Texas at Austin. An economics professor affiliated with that analysis, Dean Spears, has argued in The New York Occasions that “sustained below-replacement fertility will imply tens of billions of lives not lived over the following few centuries—many lives that might have been great for the individuals who would have lived them.”
However Musk’s habits and rhetoric don’t monitor with the egalitarian ideas these pursuits would counsel. The pronatalist group that he’s aligned with is a unfastened coalition. It consists of techno-utopians and Peter Thiel acolytes, but additionally extra civic-minded thinkers who argue for higher social security nets to encourage extra individuals to have households. The motion can be linked to regressive, far-right activists and even self-proclaimed eugenicists. In 2023, The Guardian reported that Kevin Dolan, the organizer of a preferred pronatalist convention, had mentioned on a far-right podcast that “the pronatalist and the eugenic positions are very a lot not in opposition, they’re very a lot aligned.” By way of his X account, Musk has amplified to his hundreds of thousands of followers the discuss given by Dolan at that 2023 convention.
Though different distinguished pronatalists disavow the eugenics connection, the motion’s politics can veer into alarming territory. In November 2024, The Guardian reported that Malcolm and Simone Collins, two of the pronatalist motion’s most vocal figures, wrote a proposal to create a futuristic city-state designed to avoid wasting civilization that included the “mass manufacturing of genetically chosen people” to create a society that might “grant extra voting energy to creators of economically productive brokers.” Final month, the Occasions reported that Musk has “privately” frolicked with the Collinses.
Musk has additionally dabbled with scientific racism on X. The centibillionaire has engaged with and reposted statements by Jordan Lasker, a proponent of eugenics who goes by the identify Crémieux on-line, in accordance with reporting from The Guardian. On his Substack, Lasker has written about supposed hyperlinks between nationwide identification and IQ—defending at size an evaluation that means that individuals in sub-Saharan Africa have “very low IQs” on common. Musk could not have explicitly commented on Lasker’s work, which means a relationship between race and intelligence, however in 2024, he responded favorably to an X put up that argued that “HBCU IQ averages are inside 10 factors of the brink for what is taken into account ‘borderline mental impairment.’” The unique put up was ostensibly criticizing a United Airways program that gave college students at three traditionally Black faculties and universities a possibility to interview for a pilot-training program. In his response to that put up, Musk wrote, “It is going to take an airplane crashing and killing a whole bunch of individuals for them to vary this loopy coverage of DIE.” (“DIE” is Musk’s play on DEI.)
Musk ceaselessly engages in the sort of cagey shitposting—feedback that appear to endorse scientific racists or eugenicist considering with out outright doing so. These searching for to grasp the worldview of some of the highly effective males on Earth are left to search out the context for themselves. That context ought to embody Musk’s circle of relatives historical past, beginning along with his upbringing through the apartheid regime in South Africa and the beliefs of his grandfather Joshua Haldeman, who, as Joshua Benton reported for The Atlantic in 2023, was a radical technocrat and anti-Semite who wrote of the “very primitive” natives of South Africa after he moved there from Canada.
As Benton accurately notes, the sins of the grandfather should not the sins of the grandson; Musk’s father, for instance, was a member of an anti-apartheid occasion in South Africa, and Ashlee Vance reported in his biography of Musk that the apartheid system was a main cause Musk left South Africa. However, as Benton additionally writes, “when Musk tweets that George Soros ‘seems to need nothing lower than the destruction of western civilization’—in response to a tweet blaming Soros for an ‘invasion’ of African migrants into Europe—he isn’t the primary in his household to insinuate {that a} rich Jewish financier was manipulating 1000’s of Africans to advance nefarious targets.”
Musk can be preoccupied with the far-right principle of white genocide, posting at numerous factors previously couple of years on X about how he feels there’s a plot to kill white South Africans. Although South Africa has among the many highest homicide charges on the earth, there is no such thing as a proof of a scientific white genocide there. But throughout Musk’s political tenure, the Trump administration welcomed 59 white Afrikaner refugees whereas successfully closing off admission from different nations, together with Sudan and the Republic of the Congo.
Here’s a thought experiment: Primarily based on the applications that Musk has reduce, based mostly on the individuals he meets with and reads, based mostly on the home windows we now have into his considering, who do you think about may be welcomed on the Starship? On X, Musk has implied that the next are all threats to “Western Civilization”: DEI applications, George Soros, the supposedly left-wing judiciary, and far of what will get put below the umbrella of “wokeness.” Transgender-youth rights, in accordance to Musk, are a “suicidal thoughts virus” attacking Western civilization.
Even the thought of empathy, Musk argues, is a sort of existential risk. “The elemental weak spot of Western civilization is empathy, the empathy exploit,” Musk mentioned in February on Joe Rogan’s podcast. “They’re exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response,” he mentioned of liberal politicians and activists. Musk, after all, was defending his tenure within the federal authorities, together with his dismantling of USAID. Canceling applications abroad is constant along with his philosophy that “America is the central column that holds up all of the locations in civilization,” as he instructed Baier throughout his Fox look. Observe that logic: Reducing world support frees up assets that can be utilized to assist Individuals, who, in flip, can work towards advancing Western civilization, partially by pursuing a MAGA political agenda and funding pronatalist applications that permit for privileged individuals (ideally white and “excessive IQ”) to have extra youngsters. The considering appears to go like this: Who cares if individuals in South Sudan and Somalia die? Western civilization will thrive and propagate itself throughout the cosmos.
Those that imagine in this type of considering would possibly say that line gadgets on USAID’s ledger are solely of minor consequence within the grand scheme of issues. However the world shouldn’t be ruled by the logic of a science-fiction plot. “The actual fact is, it’s all interconnected,” Catherine Connor, the vice chairman of public coverage on the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Basis, instructed us after we requested in regards to the grants Musk’s crew had terminated at USAID. “In the event you take one factor away, you’ve damaged a hyperlink in a sequence.” She described a state of affairs that her group is seeing play out on the bottom proper now, the place new HIV-positive moms take their infants for a dry-blood-spot check to find out if the kid has HIV as effectively. The spot check should be transported to a lab to get outcomes, which is able to decide if a baby is HIV optimistic and if they need to obtain lifesaving remedy. “In a lot of our websites, in lots of the nations we’re working in, that lab transport has been terminated,” Connor mentioned. “So we will do all this stuff, however as a result of we misplaced the lab half, we don’t know if this baby’s HIV-positive or not.” A hyperlink within the chain is damaged; persons are left on their very own. The long run turns into much less sure, a bit darker.
“There’s a way of despondence, a way of hopelessness that I haven’t sensed in my time working on this subject,” Connor mentioned. “The extent of uncertainty and the extent of tension that’s been created is nearly as damaging because the cuts themselves.” It appears this hopelessness is a function of a worldview dedicated to eradicating what Musk calls “suicidal empathy.” Regardless, Musk, it seems, is rather more concerned about speaking about his self-landing rockets and a future he guarantees is simply on the horizon.
However a lot as Musk would possibly need us to divert our eyes upward, one thing horrible is occurring on Earth. The world’s richest man is stopping lifesaving support from reaching the world’s poorest youngsters, closing off their future as he fantasizes about one other.
Illustration sources: Oranat Taesuwan / Getty; Neutronman / Getty; Win McNamee / Getty; SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY / Getty
