The Real Reason Elon Musk Keeps Insisting DOGE Cuts Killed “Zero” Kids

“Zero died because of DOGE. Zero. Point. Zero.”

That remarkable claim is from Elon Musk’s interview last week with The Economist, in which he reiterated one of his favorite new claims: His Department of Government Efficiency’s huge cuts to international humanitarian aid did not result in the death of any children abroad. This isn’t meant as a vague or hyperbolic exaggeration. Musk’s assertion is quite emphatically that not a single child—or even a fraction of a child, as his strange “zero point zero” formulation suggests—died due to these DOGE cuts.

Musk’s Economist interview is getting attention for outsized predictions and meltdown moments: He insisted AI will surpass human intelligence in only five years and seethed to his interviewer, Economist editor Zanny Minton Beddoes, that “people loathe you.” But we think Musk’s claims about DOGE and children capture something darker that’s  been overlooked: The global far right is operating within a mode of language and communication that many liberals simply don’t understand. We’ve got to get better at grasping it—and countering it.

Musk’s assertion that “zero died” came in this striking, extended exchange: 

But it’s all nonsense. Researchers have documented hundreds of thousands of deaths. A USAID whistleblower revealed that the agency itself projected that the cuts would unleash immense human suffering. Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times recently documented specific, concrete cases of people who died in Africa of malaria, HIV, and other maladies due to DOGE-driven reductions in medical supplies and aid workers.

“After visiting numerous impoverished villages,” Kristof concluded, “aid cuts are unquestionably costing the lives of many children.”

When pressed by Beddoes on the havoc the cuts have unleashed, Musk dissembled. He insisted that humanitarian aid has been transferred to the State Department, which, even if true, is specious: Only a small fraction of that aid was left to get transferred in the first place. As refugee advocate Jeremy Konyndyk told us, “you’ve still got huge ruptures in basic services.”

Musk also insisted DOGE can’t be blamed because other NGOs or private foundations could have made up the shortfall. But that undercuts itself: If by Musk’s own lights other groups could have prevented these deaths, then it only confirms that DOGE’s withdrawal of the funding did initiate them. And as Beddoes noted, it’s unlikely that others could have stepped in quickly enough: The sudden withdrawal of funding itself wrecked aid supply chains.

All this pushback from Kristof and Beddoes—who nonetheless indicated some “sympathy” with Musk’s claims about USAID—constitutes important work. But on some level, these fact-checks miss the point. We don’t think Musk intends claims like these to be debated on an empirical level. Rather, Musk is communicating in  subterranean tropes that his far-right global audience will instantly find intelligible: he’s advancing the generalized sentiment that due to DOGE cuts, nobody died for whom we need to feel any passing responsibility. Nobody died who’s worthy of our concern. 

“They cannot cite a single name of someone who died,” Musk recently posted. “Not a single name!” That’s false, as Kristof demonstrated, and of course it’s absurd to demand single names when we’re talking about enormous numbers of deaths. It’s beyond contestation that USAID’s destruction unleashed fresh humanitarian horrors. But the key event here is Musk continuing to assert otherwise in the face of an escalation of human suffering that’s amply documented: You can’t name these people. They never existed. 

As the two of us have detailed, Musk’s rhetoric has grown ominously more oriented around the idea of global race war. Last month, after an immigrant stabbed a white man in Northern Ireland, Musk used his X platform to viciously stoke anti-immigrant anger and helped incite days of far-right riots and pogroms there, often using stark invocations of global racial armageddon to do so.

Musk has elevated eugenicist claims and has even expressly linked the need to protect the white populations of the world—supposedly under siege by nonwhite invasions—to the broader battle to defend “Western civilization.” Indeed, in their great book on Musk’s worldview, Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff painstakingly demonstrate that Musk’s conception of the West is deeply “bound up with the survival of white civilization.” 

Musk’s “zero died” trope is the latest chapter in this vile story. Even as he was decimating USAID, he explicitly denigrated what he called “civilizational suicidal empathy,” i.e. the idea that if we don’t quickly shrug off all squishy humanitarian sentiments, the West will perish. The USAID cuts, then, were a dry run for the much larger abandonment of responsibility for the civilizational dead weight that may be necessary if and when climate change and/or other problems worsen humanitarian conditions for the global poor in unforeseen ways.

Tellingly, over the weekend, Musk explicitly labeled Beddoes a “traitor to the West” for confronting him with facts about DOGE’s moral crimes. Telling the truth, or even evincing concern, about the humanitarian impact of our actions on the global poor risks aggravating that “civilizational empathy” that so threatens Western Civilization, you see. As the West is inseparable from white civilization for Musk, this is tantamount to labeling Beddoes with the white supremacist epithet “race traitor.”

Indeed, if you watch Musk in this interview, as he sits there smugly abusing Beddoes in his edgelordy leather jacket, you can see something remarkable unfolding in real time. As Musk repeats emphatically that “zero died” in the face of obvious contrary evidence, he’s visibly sensing his growing power to communicate with fascistic tropes to like-minded western- and white-civilizational warriors everywhere. 

All this was visible during another big moment in the Economist interview: Musk’s claim that the United Kingdom is slipping into civil war. Musk often describes the UK as under criminal and migrant siege, and Beddoes took him to task for it. “You have painted” Europe and the UK as “overrun with terrifying Muslim immigrants” and beset with “rape on every corner,” she said acidly.

But Musk stood by his depiction of a Muslim invasion. He insisted a “large and growing” group “whose beliefs are antithetical to western beliefs” had entered the country, predicting it’s only a matter of time until there’s a “reckoning,” which will come when they “try to implement their views.”

One of us—Toby—lives in the UK, and can categorically state that Musk’s depiction of the country is complete nonsense. In most major cities you can walk around by yourself late at night without a second thought. The country is palpably safer than it was only a few decades ago, and would rank among the least violent cities in the U.S. 

What’s more, thanks to her empire, Britain has already had centuries of non-white, non-Christian immigration. The first curry house opened in 1810. Every generation has seen apocalyptic warnings of immigration unleashing rivers of blood that never materialize. Racist and political violence come almost exclusively from white nativists and the political right. Studies show the areas of the UK with the most immigrant settlers have seen the fastest declines in crime.

But here, again, Musk’s depictions of the UK are not meant to be debated empirically. When Beddoes asked Musk if he’s “anti-Muslim,” he rejoined: “I’m against rape and murder.” The linking of Muslims to rape and murder was immediate, unevidenced, instinctive. It’s not subject to debate. It’s true by definition.

For Musk, the notion that white nations are threatened by non-white contamination is a starting point—something to be reasoned from, not reasoned to. As we have argued, Musk is in many ways classically fascist: He believes race and culture are inseparable. His vision is international: in defense of the west, white nations must globally if loosely unite. 

What are these nations, exactly? In the UK, the far right claim to be nationalists. But they hate the government, the Church of England, the National Trust, its most famous TV shows and TV presenters, and even the King (not to mention its schools, universities, and police). What is the Englishness they are defending, if not these things? It’s the racial and cultural nation.

Unlike the nation as understood even by some mainline conservatives, then, the fascist nation is not real. It is a past conceived in myth that has supposedly been lost to contamination and degradation—and must be willed back into existence through violent ethnic purgings. These purgings, really, are what will bring the myth to life. Outside of the racial nation—which isn’t a geographic unit but something more mystical—lie only darkness, threats, and huge, teeming, masses of inferior humanity. The mythic past and the promises of purity are all fantasy, of course, but the purgings are brutally real.

The big through line here is vicious dehumanization: No kids have died due to USAID cuts—none that we need to concern ourselves with, as they don’t serve the higher cause of the nation. All Muslim immigrants in the UK are rapists and murderers; as Musk suggests, asking if you’re “anti-Muslim” is akin to asking if you’re pro-rape and pro-murder. No one who has been killed by ICE is innocent; as Trump’s border czar Tom Homan puts it, to avoid violent death at the hands of ICE agents, don’t antagonize them. No Somali living in Minnesota is there legitimately; as Trump himself says, all should be subject to removal by definition.

Musk constantly talks about a technological future of dazzling plenty that will extend to all: In the Economist interview, he predicted that by 2036 we’ll see such “amazing abundance” that money will become meaningless. But his own rhetoric suggests he envisions something more like techno-utopia only for a select interplanetary elite—after the dust settles from racial apocalypse on Earth. And as he himself has cryptically intimated on occasion, he’s gearing up his SpaceX rockets for exactly that future.