‘I Wouldn’t Want That Guy To Babysit My Kid’: Elon Musk Lights Into Bill Gates Over Ties to Pedophile Jeffrey Epstein
‘Who does Bill Gates think he is to make comments about the welfare of children,’ the Tesla CEO says.
The long-standing feud between Elon Musk and Bill Gates reached new heights on Tuesday, when the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX blasted the founder of Microsoft as “close friends” with a convicted pedophile, Jeffrey Epstein.
During a combative question-and-answer session for the Qatar Economic Forum on Tuesday, the BBC’s Mishal Husain started to ask Mr. Musk about Mr. Gates’s recent claim that cuts to the United States Agency for International Development program would result in “millions of deaths.”
“He’s a huge liar. That’s terrible,” Mr. Musk said. Ms. Husain got defensive, saying, “You’ve said that already.”
Mr. Musk was having none of it, striking out at Mr. Gates on personal terms. “Who does Bill Gates think he is to make comments about the welfare of children given that he was close friends with Jeffrey Epstein?” Mr. Musk said, prompting laughter and groans from the audience.
“I wouldn’t want that guy to babysit my kid, I can tell you that,” Mr. Musk said with a smile.
Mr. Gates earlier this year acknowledged that it was a “huge mistake” to pal around with Epstein, with whom he began a friendship after the late financier had already been convicted of child sex trafficking (he served jail time for soliciting prostitution from a minor and was required to register as a sex offender). The pair had several dinners together and were working on joining forces for a new, multibillion-dollar charitable fund.
“In retrospect, I was foolish to spend any time with him. And he, sort of, got time with various people by spending time with other people,” he told the Wall Street Journal in January. “So yes, I think I was quite stupid. I thought it would help me with global health philanthropy. In fact, it failed to do that; it was just a huge mistake.”
The dustup between the two billionaires came after Mr. Gates criticized Mr. Musk’s work as the de facto head of the Department of Government Efficiency, which took a chainsaw to funding for USAID. “The picture of the world’s richest man killing the world’s poorest children is not a pretty one,” Mr. Gates told the Financial Times on May 8.
