So, turns out, there wasn’t actually a $50 million government plan to send condoms to Gaza — despite what the White House press secretary had claimed a couple of weeks earlier. And despite Trump later doubling that number to $100 million and saying the condoms were meant for Hamas.
On Tuesday, Elon Musk admitted the whole thing wasn’t real.
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Musk admits he sometimes spreads misinformation
Musk, who’s leading a Trump administration initiative called the Department of Government Efficiency, had something to say when a reporter called him out on the false Gaza story.
“Some of the things that I say will be incorrect, and should be corrected,” he said. “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.”
The origins of the $50 million condom claim
This whole mess started when White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt made a big claim in her first-ever press briefing on January 28. She said Musk’s team and Trump’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 put a stop to it.
Musk wasted no time promoting her words on X, formerly Twitter.
Trump inflated the figure and claimed the condoms were for Hamas
The next day, Trump picked up the claim and ran with it. He repeated the $50 million number in a speech, but with an extra twist — he said the condoms were actually for Hamas.
Then, for some reason, a week later, he decided $50 million wasn’t enough and randomly bumped it up to $100 million, still insisting it was all going to Hamas.
The White House and State Department tried to defend the claim
Reporters started asking questions, but the White House and State Department weren’t backing down. They made a big effort to defend the story, even though they didn’t actually have any proof.
Experts on global aid quickly pointed out that it wasn’t real. Official figures showed that from 2021 to 2023, USAID hadn’t given out any condom aid to the entire Middle East.
Musk questioned whether the aid should exist at all
Then came another twist. A journalist told Musk on Tuesday that fact-checkers had discovered something interesting — the condoms weren’t even meant for Gaza in the first place. They were supposedly for Mozambique, which happens to have a province called Gaza.
Musk’s response? “I’m not sure we should be sending $50 million worth of condoms to anywhere, frankly.”
Mozambique was not getting $50 million in condoms either
Except… Mozambique wasn’t getting them either.
USAID data showed that in the 2023 fiscal year, the total global spending on condom aid was only about $8 million. And Mozambique? They didn’t receive any condoms at all.
What they did get was about $5.4 million in non-condom contraceptives, since the country has one of the highest HIV rates in the world.
Trump has not acknowledged the falsehood
Even as Musk admitted the claim wasn’t true, Trump stayed quiet. Musk made his concession while standing next to him in the Oval Office, but when CNN asked the White House if Trump was also ready to acknowledge it was false, they got no response.
The Mozambique initiative was not condom aid
So where did the whole Mozambique mix-up come from? Some people online thought maybe the White House got confused by government records. There was a US-funded health project in Mozambique’s Gaza province (and another province) that had $84 million in funding.
But whatever happened behind the scenes, one thing’s clear — the money wasn’t for condoms. The Mozambique program is a broad initiative focused on HIV and tuberculosis.
It has nothing to do with shipping out millions of condoms. That was funny, though!
