Yesterday, Microsoft founder, philanthropist and former richest man in the world, Bill Gates announced that he will donate nearly all his personal wealth through the Gates Foundation in the next 20 years to save and improve lives around the world.

Meanwhile, Bill Gates also lashed out at Elon Musk, accusing the world's richest man of sharply cutting the US foreign aid budget and "killing the world's poorest children."

"The richest people in the world kill the poorest children in the world, and this picture is not beautiful," Gates said in an interview with the media.

In February, the Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) actually shut down the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which is the main channel for U.S. aid, and claimed that "it's time to let it die." Musk responded to a post about Gates’ interview on his social media platform X: “Gates is a big liar.”

Two billionaires have very different views on charity

In fact, Gates and Musk had conflicts over charity before.

In 2012, Musk signed a "donation vow" initiated by Bill and Melinda Gates and investor Warren Buffett, through which dozens of billionaires promised to donate at least half of their wealth.

But according to Musk's biographer Walter Isaacson, Musk later told Gates that philanthropy is mostly "nonsense" and is more effective than charity solutions to commercial solutions to problems such as climate change (including Tesla's electric cars).

Isaacson described Musk's anger when he learned that Gates had shorted Tesla stock in 2022, saying Gates was a hypocrite trying to make money by destroying a company seeking to do good. In a comment on Twitter (now X), Musk posted an indecent photo of Gates with the caption: "In case you need to quickly eliminate the hormonal reaction."