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Bill Gates announced plans on Thursday to shutter the Gates Foundation in 2045 and also strongly criticized Elon Musk for slashing funding to the US Agency for International Development (USAID), accusing the Tesla CEO of “killing the world’s poorest children” in new interviews.
In an interview with the Financial Times published on Thursday, Gates condemned the sudden funding cuts to USAID by Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge), saying the cuts had led to life-saving food and medicines expiring in warehouses, and could result in the resurgence of diseases such as measles, HIV and polio.
“The picture of the world’s richest man killing the world’s poorest children is not a pretty one,” Gates said.
Since Donald Trump took office in January, he and Musk began cutting funding and scaling back operations at USAID, the US government’s foremost international aid agency, once considered the world’s largest single provider of humanitarian aid. Staffers with Musk’s Doge initiative have worked to hollow out and dismantle the agency and have terminated more than 5,600 USAID workers.
Gates, 69, told the Financial Times that Musk had cancelled grants to a hospital in Gaza province, Mozambique, which he said was working to prevent the transmission of HIV from mothers to babies, based on the mistaken belief that the US was supplying condoms to Hamas in Gaza in the Middle East.
“I’d love for him to go in and meet the children that have now been infected with HIV because he cut that money,” Gates said.
In a separate interview with the New York Times also published on Thursday, Gates said that Musk put USAID “in the wood chipper, because he didn’t go to a party that weekend”.
The Times asked Gates about Musk’s commitment to The Giving Pledge – a philanthropic commitment launched by Gates, along with his ex-wife Melinda French Gates and Warren Buffett. The pledge, which Musk signed in 2012, encourages wealthy people to contribute a majority of their wealth to charitable causes during their lifetimes or in their wills.
Gates told the Times that an “unusual aspect” of the pledge is that “you can wait until you die and still fulfill it.”
“So who knows?” Gates said, Musk “could go on to be a great philanthropist”.
“In the meantime, the world’s richest man has been involved in the deaths of the world’s poorest children” Gates continued.
Gates also told the Times that given the various cuts imposed by the Trump administration, he expected childhood mortality to go up by a million additional deaths a year.
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Gates’s remarks come as the billionaire Microsoft co-founder announced on Thursday in a blogpost that he plans to distribute “virtually all” of his wealth through the Gates Foundation over the next 20 years “to the cause of saving and improving lives around the world” before shuttering his foundation on 31 December 2045.
“Over the next twenty years, the Gates Foundation will aim to save and improve as many lives as possible,” Gates wrote.
“By accelerating our giving, my hope is we can put the world on a path to ending preventable deaths of moms and babies and lifting millions of people out of poverty. I believe we can leave the next generation better off and better prepared to fight the next set of challenges.
“It’s unclear whether the world’s richest countries will continue to stand up for its poorest people. But the one thing we can guarantee is that, in all of our work, the Gates Foundation will support efforts to help people and countries pull themselves out of poverty. There are just too many opportunities to lift people up for us not to take them.”
Gates estimates that between now and 2045, the foundation will spend more than $200bn on these efforts.
