With the Oval Office looking more like a middle school classroom every day, let’s recall the way, once upon a time, we responded to childhood taunts from a playground bully. You remember how it goes. Your nemesis says mockingly that you’re a this-or-that and you shout back: “Takes one to know one!” Indeed, it does. This month, Microsoft founder Bill Gates said of his fellow billionaire Elon Musk: “The world’s richest man has been involved in the deaths of the world’s poorest children.”
Elaborating, Gates explained that Musk, as head of his self-created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), had decided to put “USAID in the wood chipper” by cutting 80% of its global humanitarian programs and that, he pointed out, will mean “millions of additional deaths of kids.” To help undo the damage, Gates announced that he’ll be spending down his own $200 billion fortune over the next 20 years to promote public health in Asia and Africa so that “children [are] not being malnourished or women not bleeding to death or girls not getting H.I.V.”
