Elon Musk sent a memo to SpaceX employees on Friday underplaying the dangers of COVID-19, the illness caused by the novel coronavirus, which is now considered a pandemic, according to a report from BuzzFeed News.
Musk's email, sent earlier today, told employees of the space transport company that they were far more likely to die from a car crash than COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. He also said that, based on the evidence he had seen about COVID-19, he doesn't think it's "within the top 100 health risks in the United States."
The email follows a tweet Musk sent last week saying "the coronavirus panic is dumb."
Interesting way to spin that: "CEO of a car company says cars are more likely to kill you than this pandemic."
I think he's wrong, and it's got to be hyperbole to say "not within the top 100 health risks" given the 15th place per the CDC was responsible for 20K deaths last year[0]. Actually, if you figure that the next 85 causes all split the rest of the deaths evenly (not reasonable, but puts an absolute upper bound on the 100th cause's mortality) they would clock in at ~6600 deaths each.
Soooo... I dunno. I'm not exactly surprised Elon seems straight up wrong about this, and that it sounds like he's prioritizing keeping SpaceX and Tesla at full operations over the health of so many people.
Tesla and SpaceX are financially designed to run so hot that if they shut down for half a year they might not come back. This also applies to a lot of other businesses.
He has this idea that he knows better than everyone else about anything and so other opinions don't matter. Ego and publicity and political/financial/image clout.
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From an article written 4 days ago:
Elon Musk sent a memo to SpaceX employees on Friday underplaying the dangers of COVID-19, the illness caused by the novel coronavirus, which is now considered a pandemic, according to a report from BuzzFeed News.
Musk's email, sent earlier today, told employees of the space transport company that they were far more likely to die from a car crash than COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. He also said that, based on the evidence he had seen about COVID-19, he doesn't think it's "within the top 100 health risks in the United States."
The email follows a tweet Musk sent last week saying "the coronavirus panic is dumb."
https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/13/21179291/elon-musk-corona...
Interesting way to spin that: "CEO of a car company says cars are more likely to kill you than this pandemic."
I think he's wrong, and it's got to be hyperbole to say "not within the top 100 health risks" given the 15th place per the CDC was responsible for 20K deaths last year[0]. Actually, if you figure that the next 85 causes all split the rest of the deaths evenly (not reasonable, but puts an absolute upper bound on the 100th cause's mortality) they would clock in at ~6600 deaths each.
Soooo... I dunno. I'm not exactly surprised Elon seems straight up wrong about this, and that it sounds like he's prioritizing keeping SpaceX and Tesla at full operations over the health of so many people.
0: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr68/nvsr68_09-508.pdf Table B
Tesla and SpaceX are financially designed to run so hot that if they shut down for half a year they might not come back. This also applies to a lot of other businesses.
He has this idea that he knows better than everyone else about anything and so other opinions don't matter. Ego and publicity and political/financial/image clout.
It's the Thailand cave-sub situation all over again.
Considering how much more likely you are to die from a car crash when the hospitals are saturated with covid-19 patients, he's not wrong.