Dear Elon,
Have you read the news? How about taking a couple million out of your net worth of $393 billion (according to Forbes) and feeding some kids for a couple of weeks? After all, you had a big hand in this.
Now, five months into the dismantling of foreign-aid programs, the United States will be incinerating nearly 500 tons of emergency food that had been allocated to send to starving children in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Gaza. Because of budget cuts to USAid, food that had already been acquired, paid for, and stored, is now approaching its expiration date, when it will no longer be viable for anyone.
In late 2024, USAID spent about $800,000 on high-energy biscuits, which address the nutritional needs of children under five, when those children don’t have access to normal nutritional foods due to natural disasters or war. The foodstuffs were stored in a warehouse in Dubai and were intended to be delivered to needy children this year.
Elon, we’re now going to destroy that food, and it’s going to cost us $130,000 to do it (I’d like to see the calculation for that and who got the winning bid to do the deed because $130,000 seems just a bit high to burn the biscuits).
That’s right—we’re spending money to destroy food we have already paid for, rather than delivering it to kids who sometimes, for want of something more nourishing, fill their empty stomachs with dirt.
So, how about you jumping in and ponying up a million or two to feed the kids (these supplies would have fed a million kids for ten days)?
Or make that a couple of million and you could feed them for twenty days? If you do that, you’d still have $392,998,000,000 left, and you should be able to get by. We can all see now that your indiscriminate DOGE cuts, where you were going to save Americans $2 trillion and you actually achieved two percent of that, did have an impact after all. Is this the impact that you envisioned?
Elon, isn’t it worth 0.00051 percent of your holdings to help a few kids survive and to help make yourself appear to be a little more human at the same time? That kind of contribution for you is the equivalent of me dropping an extra nickel in the take-a-penny-leave-a-penny dish at the local convenience store.
You’ve done some good things. Electric cars might work. Going to space is popular when the rockets don’t explode. I still don’t get why Twitter is now X but people still “tweet.”
But you do think big. So how about thinking small once? Tiny, innocent, hungry humans. Kids who didn’t start a war, who aren’t in the Epstein files, and who just want to get rid of the emptiness in their bellies. They don’t understand why we’d rather burn the biscuits than share them. These are children that are trying to survive.
And let’s not forget your competition. You’re falling behind — Jeff Bezos has committed $10 billion to fight climate change (through his Bezos Earth Fund) and Dolly Parton gives away a million books each month to kids under-five all over the world (from her Imagination Library).
Bill Gates is spending hundreds of millions every year, providing life-saving vaccinations throughout Africa (they believe in vaccinations there) and he doesn’t even tweet that. He also announced in May that he will give away 99 percent of his fortune – which he expects to reach $200 billion – by 2045 (Gates will be 89 then).
Elon, a couple of million doesn’t seem like much, especially since you were a major cause of these kids going hungry. But people will remember the time you saved a million children from starvation. Or at least, they would, if you actually did it. Can we get you to write that check today?
Curt MacRae, a resident of Coldwater, MI, publishes regular opinion columns
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