Elon and humanity

The tech billionaire wants to shape humanity’s future. Not everyone has a place therere

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Excerpt to first link above: In April, ezibon khamis was dispatched to Akobo, South Sudan, to document the horrors as humanitarian services collapsed in the middle of a cholera outbreak. As a representative of the NGO Save the Children, Khamis would be able to show the consequences of massive cuts to U.S. foreign assistance made by the Department of Government Efficiency and the State Department. Seven of the health facilities that Save the Children had supported in the region have fully closed, and 20 more have partly ceased operations.

Khamis told us about passing men and women who carried the sick on their shoulders like pallbearers. Children and adults were laid on makeshift gurneys; many vomited uncontrollably. These human caravans walked for hours in up to 104-degree heat in an attempt to reach medical treatment, because their local clinics had either closed completely or run out of ways to treat cholera. Previously, the U.S. government had provided tablets that purified the water in the region, which is home to a quarter-million people, many of whom are fleeing violent conflicts nearby. Not anymore, Khamis says; now many have resorted to drinking untreated river water. He told us that at least eight people—five of them children—had died on their journey that day. As he entered a health facility in Akobo, he was confronted by a woman. “She just said, ‘You abandoned us,’” Khamis told us. Read: The cruel attack on USAID

We heard other such stories in our effort to better understand what happened when DOGE dismantled the United States Agency for International Development. In Nigeria, a mother watched one of her infant twins die after the program that had been treating them for severe acute malnutrition shut down. In South Sudan, unaccompanied children were unable to reunite with surviving relatives at three refugee camps, due to other cuts. Allara Ali, a coordinator for Doctors Without Borders who oversees the group’s work at Bay Regional Hospital, in Somalia, told us that children are arriving there so acutely malnourished and “deteriorated” that they cannot speak—a result of emergency-feeding centers no longer receiving funds from USAID to provide fortified milks and pastes. Last month, 14 children died from severe acute malnutrition at Bay Regional, Doctors Without Borders wrote to us. Many mothers who travel more than 100 miles so that a doctor might see their child return home without them.

One man has consistently cheered and helped execute the funding cuts that have exacerbated suffering and death. In February, Elon Musk, acting in his capacity as a leader of DOGE, declared that USAID was “a criminal organization,” argued that it was “time for it to die,” and bragged that he’d “spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper.”

Musk did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this article. Last month, in an interview with Bloomberg, he argued that his critics have been unable to produce any evidence that these cuts at USAID have resulted in any real suffering. “It’s false,” he said. “I say, ‘Well, please connect us with this group of children so we can talk to them and understand more about their issue,’ we get nothing. They don’t even try to come up with a show orphan.”

Musk is wrong, as our reporting shows—and as multiple other reports (and estimates) have also shown. But the issue here is not just that Musk is wrong. It is that his indifference to the suffering of people in Africa exists alongside his belief that he has a central role to play in the future of the human species. Musk has insisted that people must have as many children as possible—and is committed to siring a “legion” himself—and that we must become multiplanetary. Perhaps more than anyone else on Earth, Musk, the wealthiest man alive, has the drive, the resources, and the connections to make his moon shots a reality. His greatest and most consistent ambition is to define a new era for humankind. Who does he believe is worthy of that future?

For more than 20 years, Musk has been fixated on colonizing Mars. This is the reason he founded his rocket company, SpaceX; Musk recently proclaimed that its Starship program—an effort to create reusable rockets that he believes will eventually carry perhaps millionsof humans to the Red Planet—is “the key branching point for human destiny or destiny of consciousness as a whole.” This civilizational language is common—he’s also described his Mars ambitions as “life insurance for life collectively.”

He claims to be philosophically aligned with longtermism, a futurist philosophy whose proponents—self-styled rationalists—game out how to do the most good for the human race over the longest time horizon. Classic pillars of longtermism are guarding against future pandemics and addressing concerns about properly calibrating artificial intelligence, all with a focus on protecting future generations from theoretical threats. Musk’s Mars obsession purports to follow this logic: An investment in a program that allows humans to live on other planets would, in theory, ensure that the human race survives even if the Earth becomes uninhabitable. Musk has endorsed the work of at least one longtermist who believes that this achievement would equate to trillions of lives saved in the form of humans who would otherwise not be born.