Elon Musk calls Bill Gates a ‘huge liar’ after being accused of ‘killing the world’s poorest children’ — Gates warns DOGE will cost 2M lives, fail to slash $2T from budget. Who’s right?

Two of the world’s richest men are clashing — again.

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates recently called out Tesla CEO Elon Musk over spending cuts enacted by Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), specifically its decision to shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

“The picture of the world’s richest man killing the world’s poorest children is not a pretty one,” Gates stated bluntly to the Financial Times.

Musk, whose net worth currently stands at $359 billion according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, is the world’s richest person. Gates, who once held that title himself, is now ranked fifth, with a net worth of $169 billion.

Gates argued that DOGE’s abrupt cuts have left life-saving food and medicine expiring in warehouses and could lead to a resurgence of diseases like measles, HIV and polio. He also criticized Musk for canceling grants to a hospital in Gaza Province, Mozambique, which helps prevent mother-to-child HIV transmission — a move Gates said was based on the mistaken belief that the U.S. was supplying condoms to Hamas in Gaza on the Mediterranean coast.

“I’d love for him to go in and meet the children that have now been infected with HIV because he cut that money,” Gates said.

To be fair, Gates acknowledged in a CNN interview that Musk is a “genius” in some domains — but noted that global health “hasn’t been a focus.” According to Gates, the consequences of Musk’s actions are dire.

“If it was a modest cut and a challenge to be more efficient … I’m fine with that,” he said. “But 80%, that’s going to be millions of deaths and it’s a mistake.”

Gates is especially alarmed about the impact on children, warning that without strong government support, child mortality rates could climb significantly.

"So we should be going from five million children dying a year over the next five years to four million. And now with these cuts, if they're not reversed, we will go to over six million dying. So, instead of going down, we will go back up," Gates told CBS Mornings.

His remarks came as UNICEF reported that an estimated 4.8 million children under the age of five died in 2023, according to data released in March. The report emphasized that these deaths “are not inevitable,” but rather the result of “unequal access to health care, nutrition, and protection, especially in the most fragile and underserved settings.” If Gates’s projection holds, the shift from four million to six million annual deaths would mean two million additional children dying each year — a reversal of decades of progress.

Gates also cast doubt on Musk’s goal of saving $2 trillion from the federal budget.

“I think if you show up and say, in two months, you can cut $2 trillion out of a $7 trillion budget, you’re not going to succeed,” he said.

Some of Gates’s criticism has reached Musk. Responding to a video clip posted on X where Gates warned about rising child mortality due to the budget cuts, Musk fired back: “Gates is a huge liar.”

Musk has previously criticized Gates for taking a short position against Tesla — a trading strategy in which an investor bets a stock will fall by borrowing shares, selling them and repurchasing them later at a lower price. In a fiery post on X in 2023, Musk called out the “hypocrisy” of Gates for asking him to donate to what he described as “mostly window-dressing environmental causes,” while at the same time trying to profit from Tesla’s downfall. “Taking out a short position against Tesla, as Gates did, results in the highest return only if a company goes bankrupt! Gates placed a massive bet on Tesla dying when our company was at one of its weakest moments several years ago. Such a big short position also drives the stock down for everyday investors,” Musk wrote.

Whichever side you’re on, the feud underscores a broader point: while cutting waste is important, doing so without understanding where the money goes — or what’s at stake — can have serious consequences.

Tracking where $7 trillion in government spending goes and deciding what truly counts as “waste” is a complex task. But when it comes to your own finances, spotting waste is a lot easier. Here are three simple ways to cut financial fat in 2025 — and beyond.