Live Aid founder Bob Geldof slammed Elon Musk and US President Donald Trump in the middle of a gig in Dublin on Sunday, June 1. The Live Aid legend was performing with his band The Boomtown Rats as part of the lineup for Rewind in St Anne’s Park when he launched into a tirade about cuts to US aid funding.

Claiming the pair had “declared a war on the weakest, poorest, most vulnerable people on our planet,” he used some deeply offensive language to describe them.

“A couple of Irish singers have been going around the world this week, Bruce in London, Bono in LA and us here, and all of us have said the same thing, that the strongest nation in the world, the most powerful man on the planet, and the richest ever human being in the history of the world, on the first of February 2025 declared a war on the weakest, poorest, most vulnerable people on our planet,” he fumed, adding a description too inappropriate for Express.co.uk to run.

His rant continued: “When that f***ing hedge-trimming, catatonic f***er… Musk decided that he would cut US aid, food, and medicine. Since that moment, he was wielding his hedge-trimmer, 300,000 of the poorest people in the world have died because of that f***,” he told the crowd.

Bob’s impassioned rant came as he was reunited with his Live Aid co-organiser Midge Ure at the one-day festival. The pair put together Live Aid in 1984 to raise funds for famine relief in Ethiopia, to build on the success of the charity single they spearheaded called Do They Know It’s Christmas?

“We only wrote one song together, but it turned out to be the biggest-selling record in British history,” he told the crowd as they performed it together.

Live Aid will celebrate its 40th anniversary in July, and to date, the charitable trust has raised over £140 million.

Musk recently quit the Trump administration and his role as head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). The brand new agency was tasked with overhauling US government spending. Fittingly, he revealed the news in a post on X — his own social media platform — on Wednesday, May 28.

Trump had tasked Musk and DOGE with slashing federal spending in government departments across the US, but as Trump’s global tariffs policy hit the US economy, particularly its relationship with China, the relationship between the two men became strained.

Prior to this clash, he had praised the billionaire for slashing aid expenditure to numerous places, including a tiny South African country that he claimed “nobody has ever heard of”. During a record 99-minute address to Congress, Trump included the landlocked African country in a list of the recipients of US aid that had recently had it rescinded as part of Musk’s DOGE cuts.

“Eight million dollars to promote LGBTQI+ in the African nation of Lesotho,” the president said. In an apparent jibe which was met with laughs and grins from fellow Republicans, he added: “Which nobody has ever heard of.”