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Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., brushed aside threats of legal action from Elon Musk, the trillionaire founder of SpaceX and Tesla, on Thursday.
“This is what he does,” Khanna told Digital outside the U.S. Capitol.
“It’s symptomatic of our times that billionaires — and now [a] trillionaire — can threaten to sue members of Congress for doing their job. He won’t intimidate me. I’m not going to be intimidated by the guy. I’m not going to be silenced by the guy,” Khanna said.
Khanna’s comments come on the heels of an online back-and-forth between him and Musk over whether cuts to government aid programs overseas — cuts spearheaded by Musk in the early days of the second Trump administration — had led to fatalities.
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Ro Khanna, D-Calif., left, pictured alongside Elon Musk, the trillionaire founder of SpaceX and Tesla, right. (Nathan Howard/Bloomberg via Getty Images; Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
In particular, Khanna, a high-profile progressive and a rumored candidate for president in 2028, had been criticizing Musk’s work to cut the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
“There needs to be accountability for Elon Musk. You know, they’re celebrating that he created 4,400 millionaires, but they don’t talk about the 4.5 million children around the world who he possibly sentenced to death by dismantling USAID,” Khanna said, in a recent podcast appearance, citing a study from the Lancet Group, a medical journal.
The assertion drew a fierce response from Musk, who personally oversaw efforts to trim waste, fraud and abuse from U.S. programs.
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Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., speaks at a town hall event in Stanford, California, on Feb. 20, 2026, focused on taxing billionaires and the future of AI. (Benjamin Fanjoy/Getty Images)
“Time to sue this liar,” Musk said in a post to X.
“Robber Khanna should be in prison,” Musk added in a separate reaction.
Musk, like many conservatives suspicious of government spending, criticized USAID for greenlighting millions in spending that, in their view, had little justification.
But while few Democrats defended programs for transgender comic books in Peru and Iraqi Sesame Street, critics of the cuts argued that Musk’s efforts had failed to differentiate between waste and life-saving initiatives around the globe.
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Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez announced plans to criminally target social media executives and restrict platform algorithms, prompting a profane backlash from Elon Musk. (AP/Jose Luis Magana)
By March of last year, USAID had cut roughly 83% of its programs, according to Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
It’s not immediately clear what kind of damages Musk would try to pursue in a lawsuit against Khanna for his claims.
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When asked if he would go to court if Musk followed through on his posts, Khanna said he liked his odds.
“Grok says he doesn’t have a case, so we will have to see,” Khanna said, referring to the AI chatbot on X, a social media platform owned by Musk.
