Box office numbers have long proven that U.S. moviegoers love a dystopia (even as the country has begun to resemble a real-life version of one), and in 2020, it turns out that the most relevant cinematic profile of our current moment came out seven years ago. District 9 director Neill Blomkamp’s sci-fi blockbuster Elysium introduced us to a stratified world in which the rich elite have decamped to a fabulous floating paradise called Elysium, where no one ever gets sick, while poor people labor and rot on the radioactive remnants of Earth below. The plot is not that important, but the stark image of the healthy haves and suffering have-nots was a perfect avatar for the United States’ profit-driven, hypercapitalist health-care system. The rich have never had to suffer the way the rest of us do; even before the advent of modern medicine, the wealthy have always had a leg up (even if that just meant facing the Black Death with a full stomach).

Now, with the new coronavirus spreading across the globe and the death toll rising, people are coping as best as they can. Social media has been awash in jokes about self-quarantining and photos of barren shelves at Whole Foods and lines snaking through Trader Joe’s. Journalists have kept busy opining about what a shift toward remote work might look like, while companies that peddle remote-access technologies watch hungrily. The more lighthearted threads of discourse belie a sense of uneasiness, even low-level panic, that’s been building with each new troubling headline. Those who are at higher risk — the elderly, the immunocompromised, and people with other existing medical conditions — keep sounding the alarm, and most folks are keeping an eye on the situation, but one gets the distinct impression that there is a certain class of people who have not quite worked out how much they’re supposed to care about any of it.

Tesla founder and Silicon Valley vampire Elon Musk broke the fourth wall to show the world (or at least his Twitter feed) how some of the ultra-rich really feel about the looming epidemic. “The coronavirus panic is dumb,” he tweeted on Friday, amid news of elderly Washington State residents dying at their nursing home and cases spreading throughout Italy. He may as well have been wearing First Lady Melania Trump’s notorious “I really don’t care do u?” jacket. To someone like Musk, though, it would seem absurd to worry about something like the coronavirus; in his mind, it will never impact him or anyone in his immediate orbit beyond perhaps a canceled conference or two, so why should he care? The 48-year-old CEO is a billionaire who owns a number of mansions in and outside Los Angeles; neither he nor his family need to take public transit, or do their own grocery shopping, or leave their house for any reason. Thanks to his riches, Musk is living in a real-life Elysium.

And if by chance he does contract the virus, he can likely just pay for a level of health care that people like you and me cannot even fathom. His partner, musician Grimes, is currently pregnant, but thanks to the couple’s wealth and the unlimited resources it affords them, she will be spared from much of the coronavirus-related anxiety faced by less-privileged mothers-to-be.