Elon Musk is trying to rewrite the history of his four-month tenure in Washington. As the billionaire founder of Tesla and Space X returns to the private sector after four months as a “special government employee,” he has put aside the celebratory chainsaw and cast himself as a misunderstood outsider whose dreams of efficiency were stymied by a terminally broken bureaucracy.
Nowhere is this attempted whitewashing more jarring than his effort to sweep away the consequences of the dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development, which has supported food assistance programs around the world and helped administer the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR. Musk once bragged about feeding USAID into a “woodchipper.” But, on May 20, when Bloomberg’s Mishal Husain asked about the disruption of PEPFAR funding in an interview in Qatar, the tech executive dismissed the claim out of hand.
“First of all, the program, the AIDS medication program is continuing,” he said. “So your fundamental premise is wrong. Do you have another example, since the one you cited is false?”
As Husain pressed on, explaining that the State Department—which is absorbing what’s left of USAID—had granted a waiver only to certain PEPFAR programs, Musk repeated his denial.
“It’s false, it’s false,” he said. Before Husain moved on, Musk made a promise: “Okay well which ones aren’t being funded? I’ll fix it right now.”
