"The world’s richest man has been involved in the deaths of the world’s poorest children."

For 18 of the 23 years between 1995 and 2017, Bill Gates held the title of the World’s Richest Person on Forbes Billionaires List. The title went to Warren Buffet in 2008 and to Carlos Slim for the four years from 2010 to 2013 before being reclaimed by Gates for the four years of 2014 to 2017. Jeff Bezos claimed the title for four years beginning in 2018. For the four years since 2022, Elon Musk has held the title.

Gates lost the title largely due to giving away much of his personal wealth to his foundation that, in turn, distributed the money worldwide to combat health crises in the world’s poorest countries.

In 2006 Warren Buffet made a commitment to give away most of his wealth to philanthropic causes. In 2010 he created the “giving pledge,” calling on the richest Americans to give away at least 50% of their wealth; personally, he pledged to give away more than 99% of his wealth. Gates has matched the pledge saying he will pass on less than 1% of his wealth to his children because he doesn’t believe in creating dynasty wealth.

In an interview published yesterday by The New York Times Magazine, Gates announced that he will be accelerating his giving, completely emptying the Foundation in 20 years, instead of ensuring its existence for 50 years after his death, as originally planned. Shutting it down earlier allows him to give away $9 billion a year instead of $6 billion a year.

This announcement follows a study published last month in The Lancet — one of the oldest and most prestigious medical journals in the world (founded in England in 1823) — estimating that 1 million additional children could become infected with HIV and nearly 500,000 children could die from AIDS by 2030, while as many as 2.8 million children could become orphaned in the next five years, if PEPFAR programs are reduced or eliminated.

PEPFAR is an acronym that stands for “President's Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief.” It was started in 2003 by George Bush and has been credited with saving 25 million lives.

Another weekly British scientific journal, “Nature,” found that without the United States annually spending the $12 billion on global health that it spent in 2024, roughly 25 million people could die in the next 15 years, according to models that have estimated the impact of such cuts on programs for tuberculosis, HIV, family planning, and maternal and child health.

In the interview published yesterday, Bill Gates justifiably accused Elon Musk of killing children in the world’s poorest countries by cutting foreign aid in his role as the head of the “Department of Government Efficiency” under Trump.

“Because of these cuts, [there will be] millions of additional deaths of KIDS.”

Gates said Musk and Trump have undermined decades of progress fighting diseases such as measles, H.I.V. and polio.

“The reductions to U.S.A.I.D. are stunning. I thought there’d be, like, a 20 percent cut. Instead, right now, it’s like an 80 percent cut. And yes, I did not expect that. I don’t think anybody expected that. Nobody expected the executive branch to cut PEPFAR or polio money without the involvement of Congress. What’s going on with H.I.V. research and trial networks, I didn’t expect that either. We will do our best to get these things changed. I will be an advocate. But those are real headwinds.”

Optimistically, Gates sees the cuts as a four to six-year set back in a 20-year plan. But he still says Musk is killing children:

“In the meantime, the world’s richest man has been involved in the deaths of the world’s poorest children.”