‘Some of the things that I say will be incorrect’: Musk backs away from false claim of $50 million for Gaza condoms

By Daniel Dale, CNN

Washington (CNN) — Elon Musk acknowledged Tuesday that there might not have been a federal plan to spend $50 million on condoms for Gaza — two weeks after the White House press secretary told the false story at an official briefing and more than a week after the president baselessly doubled the phony figure to $100 million and said the condoms were going to Hamas.

“Some of the things that I say will be incorrect, and should be corrected,” Musk, the billionaire businessman who is leading a Trump administration initiative they call the Department of Government Efficiency, said when a reporter told him the Gaza story was wrong. “So, nobody’s going to bat a thousand. I mean, any – you know, we will make mistakes, but we’ll act quickly to correct any mistakes.”

This correction was not particularly quick. Press secretary Karoline Leavitt’s claim that President Donald Trump had thwarted $50 million in condom funding for Gaza made headlines around the world in late January. Trump kept repeating the story, and inflating the figure, even after media outlets reported it was highly unlikely to be true.

The saga of the imaginary condom aid began when Leavitt announced during her debut White House press briefing on January 28 that Musk’s team and the president’s budget office had “found that there was about to be 50 million taxpayer dollars that went out the door to fund condoms in Gaza” before Trump imposed a freeze on foreign aid. Musk promoted Leavitt’s words on the X social media platform he owns.

The White House and State Department then made a vigorous attempt to defend the story to skeptical reporters – though it was clear the administration had no evidence to substantiate the $50 million figure, experts on global aid said the story was fiction, and official figures showed the US Agency for International Development (USAID) had not provided any condom aid to the entire Middle East from the 2021 fiscal year through the 2023 fiscal year.

Undeterred by the fact checks, Trump repeated the $50 million figure in a speech the day after Leavitt’s briefing; Trump’s version of the story was even more inflammatory, saying the frozen money was supposed to purchase condoms “for Hamas.” Then, the following week, Trump doubled the $50 million figure without explanation, saying the plan was to spend $100 million on the condoms “to Hamas.”

Musk, who regularly makes and amplifies false claims on X, formerly known as Twitter, made his Tuesday concession while standing next to Trump in the Oval Office. CNN asked the White House on Tuesday evening if Trump, too, now acknowledges the claim is wrong; the White House had not responded as of Wednesday morning.

Mozambique wasn’t getting $50 million in condoms, either

The journalist who asked Musk about the condoms story on Tuesday said to him that fact checks had found the condoms were not for the Palestinian territory of Gaza but for the African country of Mozambique, which has a province called Gaza. That prompted Musk to say — after acknowledging he sometimes makes inaccurate comments — that “I’m not sure we should be sending $50 million worth of condoms to anywhere, frankly.”

But Musk was led astray here. There was also no plan to spend $50 million on condoms for Mozambique.

Federal figures show that USAID condom aid totaled about $8 million worldwide in the 2023 fiscal year, the last year for which data is available, and that no condoms at all went to Mozambique. Mozambique, which is among the countries with the highest prevalence of HIV, received about $5.4 million worth of non-condom contraceptives that year from USAID.

So why would anyone mention Mozambique in the context of this inaccurate claim about tens of millions in nonexistent condom aid? Some social media users theorized that the White House made the claim about condoms for the Palestinian territory of Gaza because it had gotten confused by federal records showing that a health project in Mozambique’s Gaza (and another province there) has been supported by $84 million in US funding.

What actually happened behind the scenes at the White House remains unclear. Regardless, the US-funded Mozambique initiative is a major, multi-pronged effort to address HIV and tuberculosis — not a dump of condoms.

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