Is Elon Musk a Mass Murderer On Par with the Worst Dictators in History?
Yes, and this shouldn’t be controversial. He intentionally cut aid to the world’s poorest people. 1.6 million have already died and 14 million will die by 2030. (1,000 words)
Was Hitler a mass murderer? You may be surprised to know that there’s no historical evidence that he ever personally killed anyone — other than himself in 1945.1 (See, e.g., here and here.) Military records indicate he took no lives during World War I. He apparently didn’t murder anyone during the Beer Hall Putsch or the Night of the Long Knives. And he probably didn’t shoot his niece, Geli Raubal, despite rumors to the contrary.
If “murderer” means “one who personally kills another,” then Hitler wasn’t a mass murderer, because he wasn’t a murderer at all.
But of course Hitler was a mass murderer. Who would argue against this? His decisions resulted, whether intentionally or not, in an estimated 17 million civilian deaths during World War II. Though he never once pulled the trigger, tightened the rope, or held the knife, Hitler was morally responsible for these deaths. If it weren’t for him, those people wouldn’t have died the way they did, when they did.
By the very same criterion, Elon Musk is a mass murderer.
To my knowledge, Musk has never personally killed anyone. But he did terminate USAID last year, calling it a “criminal” organization that “has to die.”
“USAID was not just an apple with a few worms inside,” he wrote on X, “it was a festering ball of worms in the shape of an apple.” He also said it “is/was a radical-left political psy op.” DOGE then engaged in what one senior official described as a “mafia-like takeover” of the agency.
According to the Lancet, the most prestigious medical journal in the world, the termination of USAID is projected to cause
more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030, averaging more than 2.4 million deaths per year. These deaths include 4.5 million among children younger than 5 years, or more than 700,000 deaths annually.
Late last year, Harvard reported that “hundreds of thousands” of people have already died since USAID was terminated. As of April 2026, the number may have risen to 1.6 million — and counting.
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Hitler was responsible for 17 million civilian deaths over six years (1939 to 1945). Musk will likely be responsible for 14 million deaths over five years (2025 to 2030), if the Lancet’s projections are accurate. If Hitler was a mass murderer, then so is Musk. Indeed, given the numbers, one is forced to conclude that Musk is a mass murderer of world-historical proportions — on par with some of the worst dictators in human history.
Consider that:
Saddam Hussein “was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people” during his 23-year reign of terror in Iraq.
George Bush was responsible for upwards of 1 million civilian deaths by having illegally started the 2003 Iraq War.
Pol Pot was responsible for some 2 million deaths in four years during the Cambodian genocide.
Stalin was responsible for about 1 million deaths, though another 2.3 died from “neglect and irresponsibility.” The Soviet famine of 1932-33 took another ~6.5 million.
Mao was responsible for around 30 million deaths over two years due to the Great Leap Forward.
As with Hitler, there is no verified, universally accepted evidence2 that Saddam Hussein, George Bush, Pol Pot, Stalin (after becoming leader of the Soviet Union), or Mao ever personally killed anyone.
Think about that for a moment. These monsters took lives by pulling the levers of power available to them. They implemented policies that killed untold millions due to starvation, deprivation, neglect, and outright slaughter. In some cases, the deaths weren’t specifically intended. But we still count them nonetheless, because they could have — and should have — been anticipated.
By the numbers, Musk is worse than Hussein, Bush, Pol Pot, and Stalin, but not as bad as Hitler or Mao — though he’s not far behind Hitler. Very few people in history have been personally responsible for so many innocent deaths as the CEO of SpaceX, the world’s first trillionaire.
To put 14 million deaths in further perspective:
Hurricane Katrina took the lives of 1,392 people.
The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed about 246,000 people.
The Antioch earthquake in 526 CE caused 250,000 deaths.
The Rwandan genocide took the lives of up to 662,000 Tutsi.
The HIV/AIDS epidemic has killed some 700,000 people in the US, as of 2018.
The Armenian genocide took the lives of up to 1.5 million people.
As many as 13 million civilians died in World War I.
These are all events that, insofar as people know about them, carry a certain unsettling “dread factor.” Yet, by the numbers, all are less bad than the catastrophe unfolding as a result of USAID’s termination by Musk.
Note also that the 14 million estimate doesn’t include deaths that will occur after 2030. The loss of USAID could have effects that linger for much longer.
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Musk didn’t kill all of these people by ordering their execution. But so what? Hitler also didn’t order the execution of every person his regime buried.
What’s the difference between smothering a hospital patient with a pillow and intentionally unplugging their life-support machine? Would you not consider the person who intentionally unplugs the machine as having committed cold-blooded murder? Would they not be a killer?
Or, imagine seeing a young child drowning in a shallow lake. An altruistic Samaritan runs into the water to heroically rescue the innocent life. But just as she picks up the child, a random asshole intervenes, forcibly flings the baby from the Samaritan’s arms, and the baby drowns. Then you find out that this random asshole was Musk himself.
This is what he’s done with USAID. It was providing life-saving medical support to millions of people around the world. It was their life-support machine. And he pulled the plug, resulting in millions of patients — many of whom are innocent children drowning in a metaphorical lake — dying, often in excruciating circumstances. As my friend Devin Kellis wrote in his guest post for this newsletter:
Peter Donde (age 10), Evan Anzoo (age 5), and Achol Deng (age 8) died from loss of access to human immunodeficiency (HIV) medications; Gy Gael (age 8) died from an infection without access to antibiotics; Babagana Bukar Mohammed (age 7) died from complications of sickle cell disease amidst health clinic closures; and Yamah Freeman, a mother of two, bled to death amidst ambulance delays due to fuel shortage while expecting her third child.
Even if Musk didn’t fully understand the extent to which USAID was the life-support machine for tens of millions, it was his moral duty — as a person who forced his way into a position of immense power — to investigate. There is no ethical excuse for the world’s richest person to set fire to an organization that just 5 minutes of research would have shown him is keeping millions of children above water. He is blameworthy for all of these deaths. Can anyone seriously argue to the contrary?
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If one compares Musk to Ted Bundy, his murderous actions are completely off the charts. Ted Bundy confessed to 30 murders but might have killed up to 100 women. The latter number is 0.000714% of the total deaths caused by Musk within the next 4 years, according to the Lancet.
Why does Bundy strike fear, dread, and disgust in our hearts but not Musk, whose body count is literally 140,000 times larger? Why does the evil of Bundy disturb our conscience more than the actions of DOGE and its now-trillionaire leader? Is it just psychic numbing and scope neglect? As Stalin famously said, “If only one man dies of hunger, that is a tragedy. If millions die, that’s only statistics.”
When considering the enormity of Musk’s moral crimes, I often think about a poignant scene at the end of Charlie Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux, about a man who murders women to steal their money (as I recall — it’s been decades since I watched it). During his trial, Chaplin’s nefarious but charming character delivers a speech in which he says:
As for being a mass killer, does not the world encourage it?
Is it not building weapons of destruction for the sole purpose of mass killing?
Has it not blown unsuspecting women and little children to pieces — and done it very scientifically?
As a mass killer, I am an amateur by comparison.
That final line haunts me. Bundy was an amateur by comparison to Musk. The degree of callousness and psychopathy required for Bundy to do what he did is unfathomable to morally normal people like you and me.
But the same is true of Musk — it takes a real psychopath with zero conscience, empathy, or compassion to recklessly obliterate an agency that kept millions of children alive, and then express literally zero remorse or compunction for the profound and lethal harms directly caused by his intentional, willful actions.
Fuck the billionaires, but especially fuck the trillionaire. We live in an infinitely sad world, because the chasm between how good things could be and how bad they actually are is enormous and growing. It didn’t need to be this way.
As always:
Thanks for reading and I’ll see you on the other side!
As the joke goes, “Hitler wasn’t all bad. After all, he did kill Hitler.” Jimmy Carr (not a fan, btw!) has a version here.
That I am aware of, after having spent a few hours scouring the Internet. Please let me know if I’m missing something else! :-)
Very well said. I agree with you completely. When the fascist Trump regime is finally defeated accountability of everyone with blood on their hands will be a demand of every American with any semblance of morality. We demand justice for every victim against every member of Trump's government, especially the richest and most influential among them. The billionaires and the trillionaire think they are immune but they woefully underestimate the level of hatred they have unleashed against them. Nuremberg II is coming.