Elon Musk has once again taken aim at Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, this time questioning his credibility on matters concerning child welfare.
During a recent appearance at the Qatar Economic Forum, Musk delivered a sharp rebuke when asked about Gates’s comments on U.S. foreign aid cuts, pointedly asking: “What does this Bill Gates think he is to make comments about the welfare of children, given that he has frequented Jeffrey Epstein?”
The exchange came during a wide-ranging interview with Bloomberg’s Michelle Hussein, where Musk was pressed on potential humanitarian impacts of USAID budget reductions.
When the interviewer noted that Gates—who has spent considerable personal wealth on global philanthropy—had warned that aid cuts could cost millions of lives, Musk immediately challenged both Gates’s analysis and his moral standing to comment on child welfare issues.
This public confrontation represents the latest escalation in an ongoing feud between the two tech billionaires. The tension dates back at least five months, when Musk appeared on the All-In Podcast and offered a critique of Gates’s technical knowledge.
Musk recounted a meeting at Tesla’s Gigafactory where Gates insisted that long-range electric semi-trucks were impossible, despite Tesla having already built and deployed them. When Musk pressed Gates to specify which technical parameters were flawed, such as battery energy density or truck efficiency, Gates reportedly couldn’t provide any data.
“The exchange exposed a disconnect between Gates’s confident public stance on technology and his lack of technical depth,” Musk said on the podcast, highlighting how assumptions can overshadow evidence, even among the world’s most famous innovators.
During the Qatar forum, Musk doubled down on his skepticism of Gates’s foreign aid expertise. When asked if he had examined data suggesting USAID cuts might cost millions of lives, Musk challenged Gates to provide evidence.
“I’d like him to show us any evidence whatsoever that that is true or it’s false,” Musk stated, adding that investigations into USAID programs often revealed fraud and inefficiency rather than demonstrable impact.
Musk described repeated instances where, when his team requested to meet beneficiaries of aid programs—particularly children supposedly being helped—they received no response. “We should come up with a show often meaning like this sort of like, well can we at least see a few kids? Like, where are they? If they’re in trouble, we’d like to talk to them and talk to their caregivers. And then we get the thing as a response, because it’s what we find is an enormous amount of fraud and graft,” he explained.
The conflict between these two tech titans extends beyond personal animosity to fundamental disagreements about technology, philanthropy, and government spending. While Gates has built a reputation through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for data-driven global health initiatives, Musk remains skeptical of traditional aid models and their effectiveness.