Kevin Brooks

Elon #Musk is a strangely vicious man, of above average business intelligence—but with no moral intelligence or integrity. He is at once grossly avaricious but without any sense of how his relentless pursuit of wealth and power hurts and kills people…real people, people with names, as Nicholas Kristof has shown. Kristof responded this past summer to Musk’s truly preposterous claim that no one has died because of the cuts to #USAID, what had been the primary engine of American governmental humanitarianism—and which was savaged by Musk under the reign of #DOGE. Appropriately, in addition to providing genuine names, Kristof cites the terrifying analyses from Boston University and a distinguished British medical journal: “A Boston University researcher estimated that the aid cuts have cost more than 750,000 livesworldwide. 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.” thelancet.com/journals/langl… Musk emerges from the 2026 mid-terms as the world’s richest man, who was able to spend half a billion dollars trying to bend those elections to his will and business interests, yet manages only to reveal himself as a man who is hollow at the core. He is a peculiarly American perversity and an ongoing blight on our national debate about what our country should become and how it should takes its place in the world. ********** Musk denies there are names for any people who have died because of the cuts Musk celebrated—celebrated by referring to having thrown USAID into the “woodchipper.” But Kristof names names…and he could have gone on indefinitely: “On X, I began to give Musk some names. Let me elaborate: “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. Medical records confirmed that, and health workers told me that she would have been fine without the aid cuts: Replacing her tattered bed net with a new one could have prevented malaria, and in any case drugs would have helped her to recover promptly. “Yamah Freeman hemorrhaged while pregnant with her third child in her village in Liberia. The United States had provided ambulances to the local hospital, but the aid cuts under Musk and President Trump meant that the ambulances had no fuel. The strongest young men in the village placed her on their shoulders and raced down the path toward town, shouting encouragement to her as they ran, but she bled to death along the way. Her parents and sister told me about this, and I visited her grave. “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. “I could keep going. A Boston University researcher estimated that the aid cuts have cost more than 750,000 livesworldwide. 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.