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  "description": "By 2030, Elon Musk is projected to have killed about 14 million people, and I think that should be the primary thing that he is known for. I think this fact should be in the first paragraph of his Wikipedia entry and that it should come before mentions of him being the head of a car company. I think that Elon Musk being known primarily for cars and rockets should sound as weird to us as Charles Manson being known primarily as a musician.\n\n You might not actually know this about Elon Musk beca...",
  "path": "/relax-its-not-technically-genocide/",
  "publishedAt": "2026-06-05T14:52:46.000Z",
  "site": "https://plato-was-a-dick.ghost.io",
  "tags": [
    "a very specific definition",
    "already almost reached",
    "Image source: How Elon Musk Killed Hundreds of Thousands of People",
    "Subscribe now"
  ],
  "textContent": "By 2030, Elon Musk is projected to have killed about 14 million people, and I think that should be the primary thing that he is known for. I think this fact should be in the first paragraph of his Wikipedia entry and that it should come before mentions of him being the head of a car company. I think that Elon Musk being known primarily for cars and rockets should sound as weird to us as Charles Manson being known primarily as a musician.\n\nYou might not actually know this about Elon Musk because nobody really talks about it, and that’s because, as is my understanding, what Musk did was not technically a genocide. Genocide has a very specific definition as per the United Nations. To wit:\n\n> Any act committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:\n\n> - Killing members of the group;\n>  - Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;\n>  - Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;\n>  - Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;\n>  - Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.\n\nWhen Donald Trump was elected and temporarily deputized Elon Musk as the de facto administrator of the federal government, his first act was to completely shutter the US Agency for International Development (USAID), a broad agency responsible for helping feed, educate, and combat disease, among other things, in developing nations around the world. Without this aid, millions of these people will die. We have already almost reached the first million deaths milestone. To link this with something that actually has reached the media: this is why Ebola is ripping through the Congo right now.\n\nNot that Musk is one to be concerned about viruses\n\nYou can say what you want about America’s responsibility to do this in the first place and you can say what you want about Soft Power being Bad Actually and you can say what you want about the third world’s overreliance on aid being a long term net harm, whatever whatever. The fact remains that they didn’t end USAID by trying to wean nations off of it or wind it down in a way that would limit the harm of ending it. As Musk boasted, he “fed it into a woodchipper” in one weekend. He fucking _loved_ doing this. Aid workers around the world were told to drop what they were doing and get on the first plane home to receive their termination letter. Ships halfway across the Atlantic laden with food and medicine were turned around and their cargo destroyed as its intended recipients just buckled over and died.\n\nElon Musk and everyone else who signed off on immediately ending USAID knew that it was going to kill lots of people. I’m willing to believe they were so ignorant that they wouldn’t know it would be millions, but they knew it would be many, many. They didn’t care.\n\nImage source: How Elon Musk Killed Hundreds of Thousands of People\n\nBut this is not technically genocide because killing 14 million people, half of them children, is not the primary motivation. Now you can do a record scratch freeze frame here and say “but Sped, these are fascists,” and I agree with you wholeheartedly. Elon Musk in particular is a craven white supremacist and I have no doubt that killing 14 million brown-to-black people has him all aflutter. But it is not, or cannot be proven to be, his primary motivation for doing this. The primary motivation was domestic political theatre. So it isn’t a genocide, so people don’t talk about it.\n\nFun? Here’s another:\n\n### For free subscribers, this is a preview. Free subscribers get access to this article on Friday 12-June\n\n### This post is for subscribers only\n\nBecome a member to get access to all content\n\nSubscribe now",
  "title": "🔒 Relax, It's Not Technically Genocide",
  "updatedAt": "2026-06-05T14:52:46.468Z"
}