Elon Musk Or The Make-A-Wish Foundation: Who Kills More Humans Annually?

I believe that I should begin with a bit of clarification here: when I say that Elon Musk and the Make-A-Wish Foundation of America (MAWFA) kill humans, I’m not suggesting that they go around committing murder. What I am saying is that they divert funds from life-saving healthcare initiatives, which has the second-order effect of causing more humans to die from disease. Below I estimate the annual death toll of both.

Elon Musk

As of January 2025, Elon Musk managed to get a role in the US government’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) where he managed to substantially cut the US government’s global health programs, which make up 20–25% of the world’s global health programs (GiveWell, 2025).

It is estimated that the results of these cuts will be that an adult life will be lost every 3.3 minutes and a child will die every 31 minutes (Colarossi, 2025). Over the course of a year, this will come to 159,273 adult deaths and 16,955 child deaths, which is 176,228 annual human deaths.

If there’s an equal probability (50%) that these funding cuts will be reversed either four years or eight years after implementation (depending on the policies of the next administration), then Elon Musk’s role in the Department of Government Efficiency is estimated to result in 1,057,368 human deaths under this scenario.

Obviously there is a chance that these funding cuts will be reversed sooner or later than 4–8 years, and the death rate may increase or decrease due to external factors. I just personally find it puzzling that Elon Musk possibly managed to kill more humans than the entire population of Fiji (Worldometer, 2025) and face relatively little backlash. In my experience he gets more criticism for the aesthetics of his Cybertrucks.

Make-A-Wish Foundation of America

I suspect that the people running the Make-A-Wish Foundation of America are empathetic and kind towards humans, so I’d like to clarify that I’m merely exploring their foundation’s effects on diverting funds from life-saving charities, and not criticizing the character of the people running it.

First, I need to estimate how much money that they divert from effective human-life-saving charities. Due to the ease of finding statistics on the matter (and the fact that MAWFA operates in the USA), I am going to focus on the United States. In 2023, Americans gave $557 billion to charity (National Philanthropic Trust, 2025). That same year, a US-based effective charity called GiveWell received $355 million (Givewell 2024b), and the Make-A-Wish Foundation of America received $100 million in grants & contributions (Make-A-Wish Foundation, 2025).

Assuming that every dollar donated to MAWFA would have otherwise been donated to another charity, distributed by the donation patterns of Americans in 2023, then the Make-A-Wish Foundation of America had redirected ~$63,746 from GiveWell to itself.

Going off of GiveWell’s estimate that it takes $3,000 to $5,500 to save a life (GiveWell, 2024a), I will take a mean estimate that every $4,250 diverted from effective charities will cost one human life. This implies that the Make-A-Wish Foundation of America had cost ~15 human lives in 2023.

There are a few issues with my assumptions here. Firstly, not all US-based donations to effective charities are to GiveWell, and lives are definitely saved by donating to less effective human charities (such as suicide hotlines, homeless shelters, etc.). This implies that the 15 lives figure may be an underestimate.

On the other hand, not all donations to GiveWell come from the USA (possibly from countries where donating to Make-A-Wish is much more rare), and the Make-A-Wish Foundation of America is likely receiving a portion of their funds from individuals who may have otherwise not donated to charity at all. This implies that the 15 lives figure may be an overestimate. Since I can’t find any data on the topic, I’m going to assume that the 2 competing pairs of factors will cancel out and that the 15 human lives cost per year is a satisfactory estimate.

Conclusion

I predict that the changes to the US government made by Elon Musk kill approximately 12,000 times as many humans per year as the Make-A-Wish Foundation.

Bibliography

**Colarossi, J. (2025). **“It’s unacceptable”: BU mathematician tracks how many deaths may result from USAID, Medicaid cuts. Boston University. https://www.bu.edu/articles/2025/mathematician-tracks-deaths-from-usaid-medicaid-cuts/

**GiveWell. (2024a).** How much does it cost to save a life? GiveWell. https://www.givewell.org/how-much-does-it-cost-to-save-a-life

**GiveWell. (2024b). **GiveWell Metrics Report — 2023 Annual Review. GiveWell. https://files.givewell.org/files/GiveWell_Metrics_Report_2023.pdf

GiveWell. (2025). **USAID funding cuts: Our response and ways to help. **GiveWell. https://www.givewell.org/research/funding-cuts

Make-A-Wish Foundation. (2025). Managing our funds. Make-A-Wish. https://wish.org/managing-our-funds

National Philanthropic Trust. (2025). Charitable giving statistics. NPTrust. https://www.nptrust.org/philanthropic-resources/charitable-giving-statistics/

**Worldometer. (2025).** Population by country. Worldometer. https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/population-by-country/