The world’s richest man has had enough of anti-Israel fake news peddler and New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof for continuing to spew sewage on the internet with impunity.
Kristof attempted to play gotcha! against SpaceX CEO Elon Musk by making a post-hoc argument to illustrate how the first trillionaire supposedly “killed” people by taking a blowtorch to the massive government waste replete throughout federal agencies. “Elon, I can give you many, many names of people who have died because of your aid cuts,” Kristof snorted in a June 28 X post.
He then cherry picked a few random names and then arbitrarily shoe-horned Musk's DOGE cuts as being the culprit behind their deaths: “Yamah Freeman was a 23-year-old woman who died in childbirth because you stopped paying for the diesel for ambulances in her part of Liberia. I talked to her parents and sister in their village.” As NewsBusters Media Editor Bill D’Agostino suggested in retort, this is as idiotic as saying Musk could be blamed for a kid dying in Tajikistan from toxoplasmosis because he stopped paying for his Mucinex.
Musk had a one-line response to Kristof’s nonsense: “You’re an utter piece of shit and a liar.”
Manhattan Institute senior fellow Christopher Rufo piled on the mockery: “The moral calculus here is insane. According to Kristof, the USA is responsible for every poor nation in the entire world. If an ambulance runs out of fuel in rural Liberia, that is our fault. The liberal has a pathological tension between the feelings of omnipotence and guilt.” Using Kristof’s logic, the Trump administration putting a freeze on $8 million for the African Elephant Conservation Fund means he would be liable if the world’s largest pachyderms eventually experience a thinning of the population.
You’re an utter piece of shit and a liar
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 30, 2026
What made it worse for Kristof was that he tried doubling down on his argument a day later, making himself look even more foolish in the process and teeing him up to get swatted down by Musk:
No, I don't think we are responsible for all poor nations. But we were saving 1 life every 10 seconds with USAID, and we cut that off abruptly with no time for countries to adjust. So kids died unnecessarily. And I do think that it's bad when kids die unnecessarily, don't you?
Of course, there’s absolutely zero way for Kristof to know if we were in fact saving “1 life every 10 seconds with USAID,” given the litany of chain of custody issues and lack of oversight that has become damningly commonplace with foreign aid.
As South Africa’s Mail & Guardian newspaper reported January 30, despite the U.S. giving $200 billion in foreign assistance to Africa since 1991, “African countries lose an estimated $88 billion each year through tax evasion, money laundering and corruption.” The USAID Inspector General Adam Kaplan even admitted in a March 17 statement to the House House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Oversight and Intelligence that “Foreign assistance programs, no matter which agency administers them, are targets for fraud, corruption, and diversion to terrorist organizations.”
Musk addressing these significant issues is apparently tantamount to killing people, according to Kristof. Kristof clearly didn’t think this correlation vs. causation argument through at all.
But what more can you expect from the same moron who actually tried convincing the world through garbage journalism that the Israeli Defense Forces were teaching dogs to rape Palestinian prisoners? Here’s a suggestion for Kristof: Just because you have a social media account doesn’t mean you have to post every lowbrow thing that pops into your brain.
