Musk v. Gates: is a billionaire feud shaping Trump's funding cuts?
As Elon Musk slashes federal funding to the global health architecture that Bill Gates built over the last two decades, is he motivated in part by a desire to inflict maximum pain on his rival?
This piece is the second in a series: When Oligarchs Cannibalize: Read Part 1, here.
Over the last few months, I’ve written several times about Bill Gates’s political misfortunes. Donald Trump has built out his new presidential administration with sharp critics of the Gates Foundation, including Vice President J.D. Vance, who calls the foundation a “cancer,” and Secretary of Health and Human Services RFK Jr., who wrote a best-selling book subtitled, “Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health.”
For the first time in his philanthropic career, Gates is in the hot seat, facing not just diminished political support—and diminished federal funding for his philanthropic work on public health—but outright hostility. This is why we see the Microsoft founder eagerly prostrating himself at Trump’s feet, praising him as a great leader—even as Trump slashes billions of dollars in foreign aid spending, much of which goes to projects that the Gates Foundation helps lead.
But Gates’s greatest political liability probably is not Trump or Vance or RFK. It’s Elon Musk.
A senior advisor to Trump, Musk has played a key role directing the activities of the Department of Government Efficiency, whose cost-cutting agenda has included a recent effort to limit foreign aid spending. Without this federal funding, Bill Gates’s philanthropic work, and his legacy, are dramatically diminished.
The funding cuts by Musk appears to be a maximalist version of the directives laid out in Project 2025, the conservative visioning document guiding Trump’s administration, which calls for reforms in foreign aid spending.1 But Musk’s attack on foreign aid, including dismantling USAID, might also be designed to inflict maximum pain on his rival Gates. At the very least, it’s icing on Musk’s cake.
Over the last several years, Gates and Musk have many times clashed egos and finances, both in private and in public. Musk now clearly has the upper hand, and far-reaching ability to hurt his adversary.
That the health of millions of people around the world hangs in the balance of two unelected, spatting billionaires illustrates how extensively oligarchy has taken over on the global stage. And it clearly signals a need for a new pathway forward, one in which the global poor no longer depend on American oligarchs to control their public health.
Though Musk has a reputation as an impulsive and erratic billionaire, it was actually Gates—the supposedly sober, rational, grandfatherly Mr.-Rogers character—who appears to have issued the opening salvo that set off the two men’s rivalry.
The internecine conflict spilled into public view at the 2022 TED conference. Musk sat for a long-form interview in which he was asked why he didn’t donate more of his mult-billion-dollar wealth to philanthropy. The subtext of the question was hard to miss: why aren’t you more like Bill Gates, giving away all your great wealth to help others? (Notable: the TED Foundation has received $8 million from the Gates Foundation.)
Musk deflected the questions, criticizing charity as a matter of “perception” not “reality,” arguing that his private ventures were doing more for humanity than most philanthropic endeavors.
It turns out that there may have been an even deeper subtext at play. Leaked text messages revealed that Gates and Musk had been in private conversation around this time, with Gates pushing Musk to follow in his philanthropic footsteps. Musk, once again, pushed back.
“Sorry,” Musk responded to Gates in a text message, “but I cannot take your philanthropy on climate change seriously when you have a massive short position against Tesla, the company doing the most to solve climate change.”
The ‘short position’ refers to Gates having placed a $500 million dollar bet against Tesla, positioning himself to profit if the company’s stock price drops.
Musk then posted on Twitter/X an unflattering cartoon image of Gates, with the caption: “In case u need to lose a boner fast.” The post was liked and retweeted more than one million times. Bill Gates did not respond.
Gates, however, did later address his short position on Tesla, publicly acknowledging it had only one purpose: to make money. For all of Gates’s pious virtue signaling about his “total focus” in life being on philanthropy, the truth is he spends much, if not most, of his time focused on himself—-whether it is endlessly promoting his self-aggrandizing memoir or Netflix docu-series, or zealously trying to expand his personal fortune and overtake his rival. Musk, according to estimates from Bloomberg, controls a fortune two times larger than Gates. Even if we count all of the money Gates has given to philanthropy, Musk’s personal fortune far outstrips that of the Microsoft founder.
Walter Isaacson’s 2023 biography of Musk gives some additional color to the Musk-Gates rivalry. Isaacson cites how Gates at one point invited himself to Tesla’s manufacturing facility in Austin, Texas—a visit designed, once again, to engage Musk on philanthropy, to position himself as a leader and Musk as the follower.
According to Isaacson, Gates apologized to Musk for betting against Tesla, but it didn’t matter: “Once he heard I’d shorted the stock, he was super mean to me, but he’s super mean to so many people, so you can’t take it too personally,” Gates said.
Musk, according to Isaacson’s overly sympathetic account, was baffled and incensed by Gates’s trying to make money from Tesla’s downfall:
That way of thinking was alien to Musk. He believed in the mission of moving the world to electric vehicles, and he put all of his available money toward that goal, even when it did not seem like a safe investment. “How can someone say they are passionate about fighting climate change and then do something that reduced the overall investment in the company doing the most?” he asked me a few days after Gates’ visit. “It’s pure hypocrisy. Why make money on the failure of a sustainable energy car company?”
Musk’s girlfriend Claire Boucher, the performer known as Grimes, added her own interpretation: “I imagine it’s a little bit of a dick-measuring contest.”…
Gates was truly puzzled about why Musk was upset that he shorted the stock. And Musk was just as puzzled that Gates could find it puzzling. “At this point, I am convinced that he is categorically insane (and an asshole to the core),” Musk texted me right after his exchange with Gates. “I did actually want to like him (sigh).”2
Isaacson also reports that Musk dismissed Gates’s pitch on philanthropy, calling it “bullshit” and arguing that every dollar given away in charity only generates 20 cents in value. This same kind of numerical analysis, of course, is the pretext that Musk now brings to the Trump administration, undertaking a relentless and myopic dollars-and-cents interrogation of everything the government does. If Musk thinks that philanthropy is ineffective and inefficient, then of course he’s going to make cuts to U.S. foreign aid—-like billions of dollars that the US government spends to help poor nations access pharmaceuticals (often through projects that the Gates Foundation helps lead).
Gates, for the most part, has responded to Musk’s funding cuts with extraordinary diplomacy, usually couching any modest critiques he makes behind effusive praise for Musk’s brilliance and innovation. In a recent interview on PBS—-notably with Walter Isaacon—-Gates very gently tried to course correct his rival: “Elon, of all the [federal spending] elimination he’s done, 99 percent of it are these employees of USAID….There’s a little bit of a discussion. Elon, I think, said, ‘Okay, we made a mistake, we went overboard, but now, what is the equilibrium? How many of those people can be kept so we can continue to save tens of millions of lives?’”
In another recent interview, however, Gates went off script and expressed his truer, darker feelings. When a journalist from the Sunday Times asked him if he thought he was like Musk, Gates went on a long rant, attacking his adversary as “insane”
“I’m ultra-different. It’s really insane that he can destabilise the political situations in countries. I think in the US foreigners aren’t allowed to give money; other countries maybe should adopt safeguards to make sure super-rich foreigners aren’t distorting their elections. It’s difficult to understand why someone who has a car factory in both China and in Germany, whose rocket business is ultra-dependent on relationships with sovereign nations and who is busy cutting $2 trillion in US government expenses and running five companies, is obsessing about this grooming story in the UK. I’m like, what?”
Gates’s attack on Musk generated widespread praise from liberal-centrist legacy news outlets, which bizarrely contorted the narrative to present Gates as a pro-democracy anti-oligarch billionaire, a righteous alternative to Musk. But Gates’s rant couldn’t have been very good for his philanthropic work—-or the countless people around the world now facing life-or-death consequences, as billions of dollars in federal funding for foreign aid dries up.
Musk’s funding cuts are supposedly aimed at making the federal government more efficient, making sure that American tax dollars are spent in a responsible and prudent manner. Most reasonable people, however, understand that’s pablum.
These funding cuts are clearly ideological in nature—designed to cut programs with which the administration politically disagrees, and, as a bigger ideological goal, to shrink and weaken the federal government. There is no reason to doubt that, for the Trump administration, personal grievances—pettiness and vindictiveness—might also play into cost-cutting decisions. And in the lead up to Trump’s presidency, Musk has become increasingly open-throated about his personal grievances toward the man that Walter Isaacson says occupies “his innermost circle of hell.”
Last December Musk seemed to suggest that a recent critical report about him in the German news outlet Der Spiegel was the result of his adversary planting the story. The Gates Foundation has given $5.4 million to Der Spiegel, part and parcel of hundreds of millions of dollars the foundation gives to journalism.
Elsewhere Musk has sabre-rattled about the need to investigate Gates’s hard-to-explain relationship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Because Musk wields so much influence over the Trump administration, he has some ability to potentially act on his chest-thumping, whether it is cutting funding to Gates Foundation projects, pushing for a new level of regulations over the foundation (or stripping its 501c3 status), or initiating a federal probe into Epstein—or dozens of other efforts that could hurt Gates. It all depends on how far Musk and Trump are able or willing to go. And how much political goodwill Gates can secure though his back-room meetings and influence peddling, and his public displays of humiliation, genuflecting to Trump. To date, his track record is quite weak, and the costs to humanity appear quite dear.
Since 2000, Gates has forcefully built up a massive, global public health infrastructure that has made millions of people dependent on Gates-Foundation-led projects for things like access to pharmaceuticals, including vaccines. The problem is this work, directed by Gates and largely funded by taxpayers, is rooted in unaccountable philanthropy, not transparent, good governance, or democratic decision-making.
Asking poor nations to organize their public health systems around the leadership of an unelected billionaire in Seattle was always a very fragile model. And this model may be moving toward its logical conclusion: collapse. As I reported last week, even Gates Foundation insiders are outraged that Gates has refused to step up and address the enormous collateral damage unfolding right now in global health.
There are no heroes in this saga—just a growing cast of self-serving, insecure, hubristic billionaires who rationalize their greed and oligarchy under banner terms like ‘innovation’ and ‘philanthropy.’
Watching billionaires cannibalize is good sport, but we shouldn’t make the mistake of rooting for one side or the other. And we also should not imagine that, through extreme vanity or hubris or vindictiveness, the super-rich will self-destruct. The billionaire class will never really, fully cannibalize. Quite the opposite, they will grow in number and power—unless the rest of us challenge and confront them. Solving oligarchy means all of us stepping up to the plate—or sitting down at the dinner table to ‘eat the rich.’
This piece is the second in a series: When oligarchs cannibalize. Read Part 1, here.
While Musk appears aimed at dismantling USAID, Project 2025’s stated goals were more modest: “The next conservative Administration should scale back USAID’s global foot-print by, at a minimum, returning to the agency’s 2019 pre–COVID-19 pandemic budget level.”
Isaccson’s biography has been criticized as being too credulous and sympathetic to Musk, but it is noteworthy to see an account of Musk presented as a mission-oriented visionary and Gates as the fickle, insecure, greedy billionaire.