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

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.

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.”