“The risk of death from C19 is *vastly* less than the risk of death from driving your car home.”

Win Mcnamee / Getty Images

Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk told SpaceX employees that they have a higher risk of being killed in a car crash than dying from the coronavirus in a company-wide email on Friday. The email, which was sent in the early hours of Friday morning and seen by BuzzFeed News, followed the same line of thinking that Musk has publicly expressed on Twitter, where he said last week that “the coronavirus panic is dumb.” In the note to employees of the rocket manufacturer, the SpaceX chief noted that all the evidence he had seen about COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, “suggests that this is *not* within the top 100 health risks in the United States.” “As a basis for comparison, the risk of death from C19 is *vastly* less than the risk of death from driving your car home,” Musk, who also runs electric car manufacturer Tesla, wrote to SpaceX employees. “There are about 36 thousand automotive deaths per deaths [sic], as compared to 36 so far this year for C19.” Spokespeople for SpaceX and Tesla did not immediately return requests for comment. Since tweeting his feelings about the coronavirus, Musk has been roundly criticized by those who feel he is not taking the current public health crisis seriously enough. Employees at SpaceX continue to work at the company’s Hawthorne, California headquarters, while Tesla’s offices and factories have remained open for automobile production. Meanwhile, the coronavirus has spread to more than 100 nations with more than 137,000 cases worldwide as of Friday. Earlier this week, the World Health Organization declared the worldwide outbreak a pandemic.

The coronavirus panic is dumb

Health experts who spoke to BuzzFeed News condemned what they saw as Musk’s “false analogy.”

“It doesn’t make logical sense comparing those types of things,” said Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security. “This virus is not a containable virus, and while most people do well with it, there is a proportion that don’t. People may end up dying from this, and we should be focused on trying to limit people’s exposure.” Brandon Brown, an associate professor of epidemiology at the University of California, Riverside, called Musk’s logic “crazy” at a time when government organizations have encouraged social distancing to limit societal risk. He poked fun at Tesla’s Cybertruck, whose botched November unveiling led one of its designers to smash two of the car’s windows. “Once we saw what happened with the windows of the car, maybe we should be worried about those crashes,” he said. In the Friday morning email, which began by noting that employees should stay home if they’re feeling ill, Musk seemed to address employees’ concerns about the coronavirus outbreak, which President Donald Trump declared a national emergency on Friday.

“Once we saw what happened with the windows of the car, maybe we should be worried about those crashes.”