“There’s a bigger probability that you will die in a car crash than with the new Coronavirus.”
These are the words of billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk in an email he sent out recently to all of his employees at Space X.
According to Buzzfeed News who revealed the contents of the leaked email, Musk wrote that the risk of death from COVID-19 “is vastly less than the risk of death from driving your car home.”
While the company-wide email started off with the reminder that employees who are ill should stay at home, it did go into detail as to how the virus spread has been greatly overstated.
“Isn’t C19 growing so fast that it will soon become a top 100 health risk for people who are otherwise healthy and young to middle-aged?” Musk wrote in the email. “The trends do not support this conclusion. Among other things, the media is using the ‘presumed’ positive number of C19 cases, not the confirmed number.”
SpaceX employees continue to work in their headquarters in Hawthorne, California amid the rising number of Covid-19 cases in the US, the most popular of which are couple celebrity Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson. Likewise, the offices and factories of Tesla remain open for production.
Musk is very open about his sentiments towards the global pandemic when he posted the tweet “The coronavirus panic is dumb” last March 7.
The coronavirus panic is dumb
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 6, 2020
When asked why he thinks so, he replied with “Virality of C19 is overstated due to conflating diagnosis date with contraction date & over-extrapolating exponential growth, which is never what happens in reality. Keep extrapolating & virus will exceed mass of known universe!”
In another tweet today, Musk explains that the danger of panic still far exceeds the danger of the virus. “If we over-allocate medical resources to corona, it will come at expense of treating other illnesses,” Musk wrote.
That said, danger of panic still far exceeds danger of corona imo. If we over-allocate medical resources to corona, it will come at expense of treating other illnesses. Track graph at bottom of this page: https://t.co/7nWKjiZyFn
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 17, 2020
Musk still tweets space and SpaceX-related things on his Twitter account.
