Elon Musk Brands Bono a 'Liar/Idiot' for Telling Joe Rogan DOGE's USAID Cuts Have Cost 300,000 Lives

Elon Musk did not mince words, calling U2 frontman Bono a "liar" and "idiot" for claiming that cuts by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) had killed hundreds of thousands of the world's most vulnerable people.

The Irish musician stated during an appearance on "The Joe Rogan Experience" that a recent report "suggests 300,000 people have already died" as food rots "in boats and warehouses" as a result of DOGE's "hard cut" of funding to USAID.

"He's such a liar/idiot 🤦‍♂️," Musk wrote on Saturday in response to a clip shared by Mike Benz, a former official with the U.S. Department of State who wrote that Bono's numbers "are f***** faker than their Covid numbers."

"Zero people have died!" Musk insisted, a claim that has been widely debunked by experts.

Elsewhere in the clip, Bono accurately stated that more than 50,000 tons of food is rotting in warehouses around the world "rather than going to Gaza; rather than going to Sudan" because of cuts to USAID's global workforce. "They're gone," Bono added before prompting Rogan to react.

"Well, they're throwing the baby out with the bathwater, right?" Rogan started. "The problem is, for sure, there have been a lot of organizations that do tremendous good all throughout the world. Also, for sure, it was a money laundering operation. For sure, there was no oversight. For sure, billions of dollars are missing. In fact, trillions that are unaccounted for that were sent off into various—they don't even know where because there's no receipts," he continued.

Rogan then shared that Musk told him that if a public company administered unaccounted funds similar to the way they are distributed by USAID, "the company would be delisted and the executives would be in prison, but, in the United States, this is standard."

"When Biden left office, when it was clear Trump won, in the 73 days, they spent $93 billion from the Department of Energy on just radical loans...and there's no oversight. No receipts. There's a lot of fraud. A lot of money laundering," Rogan added. (According to a Snopes investigation, the Department of Energy's Loan Programs Office "lent or committed anywhere from $68 billion to $77 billion between Nov. 5, 2024, and Jan. 20, 2025.")

The 300,000 figure cited by Bono comes from a model estimating the "human cost" of DOGE's cuts to USAID, developed by Brooke Nichols, a mathematician and infectious disease professor at Boston University. The Washington Post backed Nichols' findings, reporting that roughly 96,000 adults and 200,000 children have died due to foreign aid cuts under the Trump administration.

In February, USAID, which had a $42 billion budget in 2023, saw 90% of its foreign aid contracts terminated by Musk's DOGE.