Did Elon Musk say that the U.S. Agency for International Development is "one of the biggest globalist terror organizations in history"? No, that's not true: There is no evidence that he publicly said that. However, Musk did call the organization "criminal."
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) on Facebook on February 4, 2025. It read:
Elon Musk has exposed USAID as a huge international money-laundering scam that used $48 million a year in US tax dollars as a slush fund for scams, woke projects, and corruption. Elon Musk officially cancelled USAID and fired all the staff. In his words, "we just toppled one of the biggest globalist terror organizations in history." Praise God!
This is what the post looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:
(Source: X screenshot taken on Thu Feb 6 17:33:09 2025 UTC)
As head (archived here) of the newly founded Department of Government Efficiency (archived here), Musk has pushed to halt operations at USAID (archived here). According to the official informational website of the U.S. government, USAID is "the principal U.S. agency to extend assistance to countries recovering from disaster, trying to escape poverty, and engaging in democratic reforms" (archived here).
Lead Stories did not find any indication that Musk called USAID a "globalist terror organization." We used Google News to search for any news mentioning the supposed quote, which did not generate any relevant results (archived here). We also searched for the purported quote (archived here) throughout X and keywords from the quote (archived here) on Musk's X account. Neither of those searches supported the idea that Musk made that statement.
However, in a post published on X on February 2, 2025, Musk called USAID a "criminal organization" and said that it was "Time for it to die" (archived here). He has made several other disparaging comments against the aid agency on X (archived here).
Lead Stories has published fact checks of other claims related to Elon Musk and USAID.
