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Over the weekend, Elon Musk publicly challenged anybody to “cite a single name of someone who died” as a result of him gutting USAID last year during the early weeks of the second Trump administration — a “death sentence for an estimated 4.5 million children around the world,” according to representative Ro Khanna (D-CA).
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof valiantly took him up on the offer, painstakingly listing the identities of specific children and even an infant who had died in Liberia and South Sudan.
“I could go on and on,” Kristof wrote. “In almost every village you go to in South Sudan, Uganda, Liberia, Sierra Leone or other countries I reported in, you find people dying because of aid cuts.”
Musk didn’t take kindly to the journalist doing exactly what he’d asked, melting down in an expletive-laden tweet storm on Monday.
“Kristof is utterly evil,” a fuming Musk wrote, without offering up any evidence.
“Kristof is lying through his teeth,” he added scathingly in a separate response.
“Nothing that Kristoff [sic] has said is true,” the richest man in the world tweeted. “He is an utter piece of s*** and liar.”
Musk kept repeating himself in variations of the same messages, which doesn’t seem healthy.
“You’re an utter piece of s*** and a liar,” Musk responded to Kristof, who argued that “kids died unnecessarily” due to USAID cutting off funding “abruptly with no time for countries to adjust.”
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