Bono comes to blows with Joe Rogan over USAID cuts before Elon Musk calls him a liar and audience react

Bono has hit out at Elon Musk and the US government’s cuts to international aid on Joe Rogan’s podcast and some of Rogan’s audience are not happy.

• READ MORE: ‘Bono: Stories of Surrender’ review: U2 frontman’s stunning stage show becomes unmissable film

The U2 frontman appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience on Friday (May 30) on the day of the release of his documentary Bono: Stories Of Surrender, which is streaming on Apple TV+ now.

During the three-hour conversation, Bono took the opportunity to criticise the Trump administration, singling out Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which oversaw the dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).

The singer, who has been a campaigner for humanitarian aid for decades, cited a Boston University study that estimated that the cuts will cause more than 300,000 deaths around the world.

“There’s food rotting in boats, in warehouses – 50,000 tons of it,” Bono said. “The people who knew the codes, who were responsible for distributing that aid, were fired. That’s not America, is it?”

Watch the full interview above.

Rogan’s show has placed itself at the centre of the US political conversation over the last year, welcoming Donald Trump as a guest in the days before the 2024 presidential election and having Musk as a regular interviewee. Rogan also formally endorsed Trump on the eve of the election. He did invite Democratic nominee Kamala Harris to appear too, but she declined.

Bono’s comments prompted an instant reaction from Musk, with the Tesla CEO branding the singer “such a liar/idiot” on X, going on to say that “zero people have died” as a result of the USAID cuts.

He’s such a liar/idiot

Zero people have died!

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 31, 2025

South Park lampooned Bono as the biggest shit in the world. They were right.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 1, 2025

In a later exchange, he said: “South Park lampooned Bono as the biggest shit in the world. They were right.”

Musk stepped down from his role at DOGE last week after serving the maximum 130-day term as a special government employee without Senate confirmation.

Bono’s appearance on Rogan incited a number of strongly negative comments from his regular listeners, with one writing: “That guy’s about as evil as they come Joe”. Others suggested they would be skipping the episode altogether, or that it would be “the first time I look forward to commercials”.

“The show nobody expected and none of us wanted,” wrote another.

Bob Geldof recently spoke to NME about the impact of Musk’s DOGE role on international aid. When asked whether another Live Aid would be possible, he said: “It’s different now. It’ll happen through something like this. How? I’ve no idea because I don’t do social media. It’s an isolating technology, unlike rock ’n’ roll which is a gathering technology. That’s the problem. [Elon] Musk – that ketamine-crazed fool, that sociopath – recently said that the great weakness of Western civilisation is empathy. No Elon, the glue of civilisation is empathy. We’re in the age of the death of kindness, and I object.

“To understand Band Aid and Live Aid, then you’ve got to understand the agents – not just in music, but politics. Thatcher was in excelsius. It’s true that we needed to move from an industrial to a service economy, but the consequences were brutal. You know: ‘There’s no such thing as society’, ‘greed is good’. I think Live Aid was a reaction to that. There’s no such thing as society? July 13, 1985, here we fucking are – yes there is such a fucking thing as society and greed is stupid.

“We’re back to that. We’re back to a terrible selfishness.”

Stories Of Surrender is a hybrid of concert movie and visual memoir, featuring stripped-back live performances from Bono’s one-man shows at New York’s Beacon Theatre in 2023, as well as spoken word passages from the singer’s 2022 autobiography, Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story.

In a four-star review of the film, NME wrote: “As for the stories themselves, on film, they have an extra layer of emotion, allowing the audience to view every expression and impression on Bono’s face as he recalls constantly fighting for his father’s approval in the local boozer or his “selfish” struggle with striving for greatness, almost at the expense of his marriage. The fact that he does it all with just a couple of chairs, impressions and the odd sound effect is a testament to his skills as a storyteller.”

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