Opinion Columnist
Elon Musk is newly minted as humanity’s first trillionaire, but the world’s richest man seems grumpy. And he definitely is not a fan of mine.
- Over here, in the us vs them fashion, the guy's basically one-ing out Elon as the only trillionaire, versus all of us, who aren't
“Kristof is lying through his teeth,” he announced on social media this week.
I got on his nerves for pushing back at his claims that his demolition of the United States Agency for International Development last year did not cost lives. The fracas began after Representative Ro Khanna, a California Democrat, said that Musk had “possibly sentenced to death” a large number of children, and Musk retorted that it was “time to sue this liar.”
“There is not even a single dead child!” Musk protested on social media. I noted that I had met many families of children who had died — and that’s when he concluded that I was lying.
Musk’s assertion that not a single child died is absurd, yet he doubled down: “They cannot cite a single name of someone who died out of the ‘millions’ they falsely claim have died. Not a single name!”
On X, I began to give Musk some names. Let me elaborate:
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- The guy's got a right to sue you.
- These aren't Americans who died, they're foreigners.
- It's not America's responsibility to handle their sovereign nation's problems; they're not colonies