As Elon Musk tries to save face by claiming he’ll give every American child a chunk of SpaceX stock, here’s a chilling reminder of what he did that affected millions of children the second he had a whiff of federal power.

In a new interview, the documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney, who directed a just-released four-hour look at the billionaire’s life titled “Musk,” discussed the staggering death toll of Musk’s cuts to USAID, calling it a “crime against humanity.”

“There was an estimate that what [Musk] did by so suddenly cutting USAID would cost through disease and starvation as many as 14 million lives,” he told journalist Katie Couric. “Even if you discount that by an enormous amount, we know that within about a year of those summary cuts — where they were literally burning food that had already been paid for that was going to starving children — 500,000 children died.”

Musk, to Gibney’s astonishment, even joked about the cuts by saying he’d “put USAID into the woodchipper.” 

“What he put into the woodchipper,” Gibney said, “were children.”

Gibney, whose documentary Musk called a “hit piece,” is drawing from a 2025 study published in The Lancet, one of the most prestigious medical journals. It estimated the impact of Musk effectively neutering USAID by implementing a freeze on its foreign aid funding — which went to programs to combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and to address food insecurities — and slashing nearly 10,000 employees. 

In sum, the researchers found that the “steep funding cuts could result in more than 14 million additional all-age deaths, including 4.5 million in children younger than age five, by 2030.”

Even conservative estimates concurred that the number of deaths would be staggering. A tracker created by Brooke Nichols, a professor and infectious disease mathematical modeler at Boston University, projects the 1-year death toll caused by the USAID cuts at 518,000 children.

It’s a touchy subject for Musk, who continues to bristle at accusations that his actions could’ve caused harm. This summer, he challenged his critics to “cite a single name of someone who died” as a result of him gutting USAID. Nicholas Kristof, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, took him up on it and gave him a list of the specific children who had died directly from his policies, many of whom were in South Sudan and Liberia — places he had visited in person to talk to locals and healthcare workers.

Musk, rather than countering his arguments, called Kristof “evil.”

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A 94-year-old electronics mogul is in hot water with Chicago authorities, who claim that his hare-brained plan to feed hungry squirrels is instead sustaining a massive plague of rats.

As previous owner of the billion-dollar electrical manufacturing company Tripp Lite, businessman Barre Seid has been putting his largess to use by paying a small army of workers to sprinkle an assortment of tree nuts across Chicago-area parks, Fortune reports.

As local resident Caroline Novak told Chicago WGN, it’s “like a luxury mélange of really nice nuts: I’m talking Brazil nuts and walnuts… these are not acorns.”

Though Seid’s target audience seems to be local squirrels, residents and city officials note that rats have quickly grown to depend on the regular feedings. As Novak’s husband told WGN, he counted over 40 rats digging holes near nut piles during a recent walk through Lincoln Park.

The bizarre operation has evidently been underway for years at this point, earning the billionaire heaps of civil violations carrying relatively small fines. Wealthy as he is, Seid has reportedly had no problem paying those fees and carrying on — the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, as the old saying goes.

“When you’re a billionaire and you have a weird hobby and someone tries to stop you, you have complete impunity,” Novak told Block Club Chicago in a separate interview. “You just triple down because why not? You’ll pay $40,000 in fines. You don’t care.”

Now in 2026, authorities in Chicago are reaching their breaking point. Alderman Timmy Knudsen — whose jurisdiction covers the area of Lincoln Park Seid’s workers are active in — is now pushing the Chicago Park District to sue Seid in order to stop the nuttiness once and for all.

“For years, a billionaire family has carried out a paid operation to feed local wildlife, disrupting our rat abatement efforts and causing an infestation that has made parts of the park unusable for other residents,” Knudsen’s office told Fortune in a statement. “We’re hopeful that raising awareness and drawing attention to the issue will ultimately lead to better behavior and a safer park for our community.”

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In early 2022, not long after Russia’s invasion began, SpaceX made good on CEO Elon Musk’s promise by shipping thousands of Starlink broadband internet terminals to the front lines of Ukraine.

The terminals quickly turned into a vital lifeline as many parts of the embattled region were plunged into the dark and cut off from the rest of the world.

But Musk has been accused of playing both sides, with biographer Walter Isaacson claiming the billionaire had secretly ordered SpaceX engineers not to turn on the Starlink satellite network near the Crimean coast in 2022 to disrupt what Musk called a “mini-Pearl Harbor.”

And as the war rages on some four years later, SpaceX’s terminals are once again making headlines. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky accused the space company of restricting access to its Starshield service, a military version of the service specifically developed for the Pentagon.

Yet neither Musk nor the White House are willing to take any blame for the disruption, with both sides pointing fingers at each other. In fact, Musk has now thrown president Donald Trump under the bus as the scandal deepens.

“Starshield systems are owned and controlled by the US government,” he tweeted on Wednesday. “Any limits on speed or usage are decided by the US military and ultimately POTUS.”

“Starlink is a commercial service owned and controlled by SpaceX,” he added. “Usage of Starlink is limited to civilian or defensive activities and cannot be used for offensive military action, as doing so would be inappropriate for a commercial company.”

It’s a bizarre missive, especially considering what Ukraine’s actions could easily be characterized as “defensive activities,” as many users of Musk’s social media network pointed out. Besides, there’s no question Musk has an enormous amount of sway in Washington, DC, meaning he easily could’ve had a say in the matter.

The timing was also suspicious, to say the least. As The Hill reports, Zelensky made his announcement just days after Trump announced a deal with Russian president Vladimir Putin to buy millions of tons of diesel to lower prices in the US ahead of the rapidly approaching midterm elections.

Lawmakers were appalled at the US seemingly dropping the ball on coming to Ukraine’s aid.

“Reports of Starlink failing in Ukraine are deeply alarming— potentially crippling air defense against Russia’s murderous missiles & drones,” tweeted senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) on Wednesday, hours before Musk chimed in on the subject. “Trump & Musk must be held accountable.”

Meanwhile, a subdued Zelensky mourned the loss of US support.

“Really, yes… but it’s a little bit more complicated ⁠than just my emotions or my feelings,” he said when asked if he feel betrayed by Trump on Wednesday. “It’s a pity that we are losing, we are losing a strong partner.”

By Thursday, the situation changed once more, with Ukraine’s strikes on Russian refineries resuming as Starlink and Starshield services had been restored to full capacity, as an unnamed Ukrainian official told Axios.

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Can you believe it? Elon Musk — a man known for posting AI slop glorifying himself, who believes his “maximum truth-seeking AI” Grok will unlock the secrets of the universe, and believes multiple conspiracy theories divorced from reality — has apparently been struggling with AI psychosis.

The centibillionaire admitted as much, seemingly as a badge of honor, in a rant during the X Takeover event on Saturday that was spotted by Business Insider.

 “I’ve got a little bit of cyber psychosis,” Musk said. “Maybe a lot actually.”

“At various points this year,” he continued, “I’ve had AI or SI psychosis probably like half a dozen times.” (The “SI” there was referring to “superintelligence,” the term that president Donald Trump just passed an executive order to rename artificial intelligence; taking this edict seriously as the tech remains so obviously flawed may itself be a sign of some sort of disordered thinking.)

AI psychosis is the term that some experts are using to describe how AI chatbots can drive and exacerbate a user’s delusions, sometimes causing them to break with reality. In extreme cases, these can cause extreme mental health spirals that upend someone’s personal and professional life, sometimes ending in self harm or suicide.

More generally, AI psychosis is also used to mock tech figures — CEOs especially — who are a little too obsessed with AI and fully buy into every ludicrous claim about its capabilities, such as those peddled by Musk. Sometimes, techies will embrace the accusations in ironic fashion, sending a proud middle finger to the luddites who’ve declined partaking in the industry hysteria.

Or maybe not so ironic. Musk’s baby mama Claire “Grimes” Boucher not too long ago bragged about the upsides of having your mind melted by an AI model, in a rant that unfortunately appeared to be completely sincere.

“The thing about AI psychosis is that it’s more fun than not having AI psychosis,” she wrote in a tweet in December, before adding: “I’ve had it (might still have it).”

It certainly wouldn’t be unprecedented for a tech figure to weather allegations of actual AI psychosis — the non-“fun” kind — either, such as the infamous case of OpenAI investor Geoff Lewis.

Musk, it goes without saying, has been chugging the AI Kool-Aid. Moments before the admission, he talked about how stunned he’s been by AI music.

“Calling it slop-core is a misnomer, frankly it’s awesome-core,” he said. “AI music is really good.”

“It just shows taste,” he further asserted. “And youre like, ‘wow, AI can do good taste? That’s pretty wild.'”

With takes like those, we’d almost be more worried if he didn’t have AI psychosis.

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Let Elon Musk never be accused of not leading by example.

Last week, the world’s richest man sung the praises of his new Grok Bot AI agent, encouraging his followers to let it control their credit cards and shop for them.

“To buy stuff, you can just take a picture of your credit card, drop it in the chat and Grok @Bot will scour the Internet for the best deal on the item you want and order it,” he wrote.

The next day, he posted a screenshot of how he’d used Grok do exactly that, telling it “to research the most fun Lego Star Wars kits for young kids and order them.” If it wasn’t a testament to how much of a thoughtful dad he was, it at least showed that Grok could, in fact, use your credit card.

But almost as if provoking pranksters, Musk didn’t censor his screenshot at all. There, on proud display, was his order number, his email, and even the last four numbers of his credit card.

Immediately, a user named Enderman posted screenshots showing how he supposedly tricked a LEGO customer service bot into canceling Musk’s order. The post went mega viral, and an outraged Musk, taking the bait, fumed in the replies and insisted his order wasn’t canceled.

Just canceled your order, don’t share your info online guys https://t.co/n4GLXBPWWP pic.twitter.com/GoE8he0PCT

— Enderman (@Enderman) October 11, 2026

True or not — Musk certainly isn’t above a little lying — imitators followed. Another jokester showed how they used the LEGO support bot to un-cancel Musk’s order and place 400 more orders of the same product. To top things off, he also claimed to change the shipping address to Little St James, the infamous island owned by Jeffrey Epstein, which Musk discussed visiting in emails with the deceased sex trafficker.

LEGO passed up on providing a surreal statement for the ages, declining Wired’s request for comment.

Anyway, it’s probably not a good idea to let an AI agent, Grok included, control your financial information. Scammers have been targeting AI chatbots to manipulate them into recommending — or buying — scam products, such as by propping up entire fake storefronts to phish for your information or imitate defunct businesses. And the more permissions you give an AI, the more chances it has to make a terrible mistake.

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Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky claimed on Monday that the country’s three strikes on Russian tech giant Yandex’s data centers last week had been a resounding success.

Zelensky told reporters that social media platforms had seen a notable drop in Russian bot activity. Following the strikes, “it suddenly became a little easier to breathe on many social media platforms,” he said.

“A lot of people noticed it, and there was less hate, less division and fewer provocations because there were fewer bots,” he added. “And it’s pretty clear where those bots were coming from.”

The news once again highlights how data centers have become a major target during ongoing geopolitical conflict. Inexpensive drone attacks are hitting a nerve, setting back major AI data center expansion efforts across the Middle East as Iran targets the facilities amid hostilities with the United States.

The phenomenon may even be hitting close to home for certain billionaires. On Elon Musk’s Twitter-turned-X, users quickly noticed that the number of interactions the site’s owner was getting on his posts seemed to plummet in the wake of the strikes.

“Woah, Elon Musk out here getting less than 5k likes on his tweets after the bot farm got exploded,” YouTuber Zack “Jerry Rig Everything” Nelson tweeted. A screenshot appended to the post shows Musk receiving 4,900 likes after responding “Wow” to a racist conspiracy theory that claims Brussels, Belgium, is “only 10.5 percent white.”

On its face, the theory sounds pretty far-fetched. Could the destruction of a few Russian data centers really be tanking Musk’s engagement on his own platform?

But looking at the average number of likes his posts have been receiving does raise eyebrows. Throughout October, his posts garnered an average of between 17,000 and 81,000 likes per day — until the past two days, the averages slid to a dismal 11,000 and 8,000, respectively.

We certainly can’t determine a causal relationship, but the numbers are striking. And experts are paying attention.

An analysis by Cloudflare showed that traffic from Yandex had dropped by 99 percent last week following the strikes. Not all of the traffic was “necessarily bot behaviour on social media platforms,” the company clarified, pointing out that its figures included all automated internet requests, such as search engine crawlers or monitoring tools.

Other rumors that online activity surrounding Germany’s far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD) had plummeted also circulated, but as Euronews points out, there hasn’t been any independent verification of these claims.

Amid it all, Zelensky’s office walked back the Ukrainian president’s announcement, telling the BBC that he was “talking about the atmosphere on social media” instead of a concrete fall in bot activity.

It’s an extremely volatile moment in history as the United States is headed to the polls less than a month from now for the midterm elections. The subject of Russian interference, particularly during the 2016 presidential elections, has fueled plenty of heated discussion over the years. And Musk, one of president Donald Trump’s biggest supporters, has turned into an influential figure in these debates, most recently accusing Zelensky of having gone “too far” by striking Russian oil refineries.

Others celebrated the latest strikes.

“As someone harassed daily by armies of Russian bots, my deepest thanks!” former US ambassador to Russia and political science professor Michael McFaul tweeted.

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