Elon Musk’s Deadly Dismantling of Global Health
America’s decline seems to be bottomless
Why is it that when I am feeling at my lowest, and the past few days have been awful for me, I’m denied the one fucking thing that would help -- sleep. And in this unrelenting state of wake what do I do? I reach for Nicholas Enrich’s memoir Into the Wood Chipper. Because nothing reorders the gut quite like an inside account of the world’s richest man dismantling, over a single weekend, the U.S. agency that had been keeping the world’s poorest children alive.
The man is Elon Musk. He is also, by any sober reckoning, the most dangerous private citizen alive.
Not dangerous in the comic-book way. Not dangerous because he tweets too much, or builds rockets, or owns a social network. Dangerous because he has now demonstrated that an unelected billionaire with no relevant expertise and no oversight can shut down a sixty-year-old federal agency over a weekend, kill close to a million people in the doing, and walk away unscathed. Dangerous because he has shown the rest of them that it can be don…
