He was furious because I pushed back against his claims that his demolition of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) did not cost lives. The fracas began after Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., said Musk had “possibly sentenced to death” a large number of children. Musk retorted that it was “time to sue this liar,” asserting, “There is not even a single dead child! They cannot cite a single name.”

On X, I began giving Musk some names. Let me elaborate here.

Jibia was a 10-year-old girl in Uganda, ranking third in her fourth-grade class. Aid cuts meant her local clinic ran out of $2 bed nets and anti-malaria medicines. Jibia died of malaria last July. Medical records confirmed her cause of death, and health workers told me a new bed net or basic drugs would have saved her.

Yamah Freeman haemorrhaged while pregnant in Liberia. The United States had previously provided ambulances to her local hospital, but aid cuts left them without fuel. The strongest young men in her village carried her on their shoulders, racing down the path toward town, but she bled to death along the way. I visited her grave.

Achol Deng, 8, was infected with HIV at birth in South Sudan but had been kept alive by American-provided medicines costing just 12 cents a day. The dismantling of USAID and the resulting bureaucratic chaos meant she lost her caseworker and access to her prescriptions. She soon died of an opportunistic infection.

I could keep going. A Boston University researcher estimated that the aid cuts have cost more than 750,000 lives worldwide. A study published in The Lancet forecast that, at present rates, this defunding will cost 9.4 million lives by 2030. While exact mortality data is hard to pin down ironically because the cuts also reduced data collection my reporting in impoverished villages makes one thing clear: aid cuts are unquestionably killing children.

Some conservatives have jumped to Musk’s defence, asking: Why is it America's job to save children in South Sudan? Why don’t rich liberals just write checks? Why don’t other countries do more?

Those are fair questions. But if any of us encountered an ambulance out of gas with a haemorrhaging woman inside, we would happily hand over a $10 bill to save her. Historically, American foreign aid cost just 23 cents for every $100 of gross national income and saved a life approximately once every 10 seconds. That seems like a bargain and certainly wiser than spending billions on global conflicts.

This is not just about compassion; it is about self-interest. Aid money serves national security and protects us from global health crises. The current Ebola outbreak in Africa may have spiralled out of control precisely because we slashed health spending in the region.