The Tesla CEO is welcome to argue for reopening America. But he is relying on bad science to make his case
What has happened to Elon Musk?
A highlight reel of the billionaire Tesla CEO’s activities since early March includes his pooh-poohing the coronavirus “panic” as “dumb”; keeping his northern California factory open in defiance of local public health orders; falsely asserting that children are “essentially immune” from the virus; providing a giant platform to promoters of an unproven and potentially dangerous treatment; predicting (inaccurately) that the US would have no new cases of Covid-19 by the end of April; attempting to re-open the factory before the end of the local shelter-in-place order; and calling shelter-in-place orders “fascist”. (Let’s not even get into the drama over whether the BiPap machines he donated to some hospitals count as ventilators.)