Paranoid Elon Musk Says That USAID Has Been Constructing a False Reality Around Us

Yahoo

08-02-2025

Elon Musk is making a wild new claim: that USAID — and untold other regions of the American federal government, apparently — has constructed a false, "Truman Show"-esque reality around us.
Keyword: saying. It means nothing, and Musk — who's currently knee-deep in a digitally-driven power grab within the federal government — has offered no proof of the wild claim that we're living in an intentionally constructed false reality built by the foreign aid agency he's bragged about feeding into a "woodchipper."
The United States Agency for International Development, or USAID, is America's primary provider of all foreign aid. It's a complex agency that does a lot of things, from treating and preventing the spread of disease to delivering food and medical supplies in war-torn or famine-stricken areas, to sometimes providing disaster relief. It also played a significant role in advancing democratic interests in post-Soviet-era Europe and battling Apartheid in South Africa.
While USAID does a lot of good work, it's not exactly a charity: USAID is considered the soft arm of American foreign policy, working to advance American interests globally without the use or need for military force — in short, promulgating American influence and combatting that of adversaries like Russia and China. It's the friendlier face of the empire, basically.
But according to Musk, USAID is bad. Evil, actually! Since forming the so-called Department of Government Efficiency and crashing the agency's headquarters, Musk has, without coherent evidence, characterized USAID as a "viper's nest of radical-left Marxists who hate America," and a "corrupt" and "criminal" organization.
He's also made allegations, again without evidence, that USAID is corruptly pouring money into the pockets of politicians he disagrees with, among too many other paranoid claims to count. Real investigations into wrongdoing take time; there's no way that Musk and his crowd of boyish DOGE staffers — one of whom just resigned after his racist tweets were discovered, by the way — could have conducted a thorough, nonpartisan audit of USAID's records to determine large-scale and malicious criminality in a space of less than two weeks.
Much of Musk's USAID ire appears to be stemming from one Mike Benz, a former State Department official from the first Trump Administration. Benz is a right-wing media influencer with a large following on X-formerly-Twitter, and was revealed by NBC News last year to be the person behind the online pseudonym "Frame Game," an account from which Benz engaged with and promoted antisemitic and white nationalist conspiracy theories, and said Adolf Hitler "actually had some decent points." (Benz later confirmed the account was his, claiming it was all actually an effort to "get people who hated Jews to stop hating Jews.")
The former government official is also the driving force of a movement against what he refers to as the "Censorship Industrial Complex," which — successfully — targeted the Stanford Internet Observatory, a nonpartisan group that tracked misinformation narratives, with a particular focus on protecting election integrity.
Benz, for his part, has been one of the more prominent voices in the alt-right online world's push against USAID. The former official notably railed against the agency during an appearance on "The Joe Rogan Experience" in December, and Musk has repeatedly and publicly engaged with Benz's anti-USAID X posts and theories since. One of those nutty theories, by the way? The outrageous declaration that USAID has somehow built and contained us in a simulation-like world.
"I've been telling you guys forever that you've been living your whole in a carefully constructed USAID Truman Show," Benz wrote in a frenzied X post yesterday, "where none of the institutions you meet — from the media, to public health, to universities, to NGOs, to terrorists — are the institutions you think you are."
This, apparently, spoke to Musk, who responded: "It's more than just USAID, but... yes."
At the time of publishing this article, the posts have a combined near-50 million views.
What does this even really mean? Who's to say! The web is currently awash with piles of USAID conspiracies that — if someone is attempting to provide any proof at all — are either affixed to out-of-context one-liners or galaxy-brained idiocy, as more influencers and even politicians pile on.
It's tempting to just look away from bonkers outbursts like this, but the impacts have been real: USAID has halted operations worldwide. Clinical trials have been halted, food isn't being delivered, and a lot of people could genuinely die. And asked if he would go through with a pause on USAID operations, president Donald Trump said he would — and repeated similar threads spouted by the likes of Musk, referring to the agency as a cohort of "radical left lunatics," without any further support for the statement. (A spokesperson for his administration has later offered up some provocative-sounding USAID efforts that touched on various culture wars as reason for the halt, some of which were shown to be false.)
USAID is surely one of the many forces — some quiet, some loud — that shape our world. But Musk's embracing of this preposterous 'Truman Show" theory seems to veer much further into Andrew Tate-esque "Matrix" rambling than any legitimate criticism or insight into the various factions of global power struggles.
That said, if we look at the actual known facts, here, we do know one thing: USAID was investigating Starlink, the Musk-owned satellite internet provider under SpaceX, for its activities in Ukraine amid the ongoing Russian invasion. So maybe USAID was impacting Musk's reality — in a way a little too concrete for his liking, leading him to take refuge in these paranoid fantasies.
That's the thing, though. Musk, equipped with a massive amount of both financial and cultural power, is building his own reality, as he often does, in real time. There's a chance that USAID's shuttering might be reversed in the courts. But in the meantime, real harm has already been done — real consequences, pulled largely out of thin air.
"Do online conspiracy theories have any impact?" Georgetown University associate research professor Renée DiResta, a former Stanford Internet Observatory researcher and a frequent past target of Benz's rage, remarked yesterday in a rhetorical Bluesky post. "Do disinformation campaigns work?"
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