Trillionaire Elon Musk claimed on his website X that the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) funded terrorism and created the COVID pandemic.
Musk is attacking USAID because Rep. Ro Khanna correctly noted a Lancet study said the elimination of USAID (by Musk, his DOGE team and Trump) will result in a humanitarian disaster: “…Our estimates show that, unless the abrupt funding cuts announced and implemented in the first half of 2025 are reversed, a staggering number of avoidable deaths could occur by 2030.”
Musk claimed on X that USAID funding was used to fund terrorism, but failed to note USAID was not directly responsible for the alleged crimes by Mahmoud Al Hafyan, a Syrian national, who was charged by the U.S. in 2024 “for illegally diverting more than $9 million in U.S.-funded humanitarian aid intended for Syrian civilians to armed combatant groups, including the Al-Nusrah Front (ANF), which is a designated foreign terrorist organization affiliated with al-Qaida in Iraq.”
USAID funding was used for terrorism https://t.co/ZIJtYYA75s
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 23, 2026
Musk also made the false claim that USAID helped create COVID because USAID legally provided approximately $53 million in total funding to EcoHealth Alliance between 2004 and 2022. Of these funds, EcoHealth Alliance legally passed a sub-award of about $1.1 million to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China to study bat coronaviruses, not to intentionally create the COVID virus.
USAID funding was central to the creation of COVID-19 https://t.co/V803PODBiW
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 23, 2026
(Sources: Elon Musk, Justice.gov, Lancet, I’ve Had It)