Gary Zhou 
Elon Musk may have contracted COVID-19.
The CEO of Tesla and SpaceX posted the news on Twitter saying he has “symptoms of a typical cold.” He also said he was tested four times on the same day with two negative and two positive tests coming back.
“Something extremely bogus is going on. Was tested for covid four times today. Two tests came back negative, two came back positive. Same machine, same test, same nurse. Rapid antigen test from BD,” he tweeted.
Musk said he was “getting PCR results from separate labs,” and that it would take about 24 hours to get the results. “If it’s happening to me, it’s happening to others,” he tweeted in response to another user asking if this could be why we saw “such a big increase in cases.”
Another user commented on revenues from tests being “not bogus & very consistent,” to which Musk tweeted “Exactly.”
Musk’s expressed controversial views on the coronavirus pandemic before, and sometimes he’s just been plain wrong — at one occasion, he said that kids are “essentially immune” to the virus, and on another, he predicted that there would be “close to zero new cases in US (…) by the end of April.”
With his latest comments — especially the “extremely bogus” bit — he’s once again stirring up conspiracy theories, one of which claims that the numbers of COVID-19 patients are exaggerated.
In fact, it is known that the rapid antigen tests that Musk has apparently taken are not entirely reliable, so they are mostly used for initial screening on whether or not an individual has COVID-19. Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests must be used with a much higher degree of certainty. There’s nothing especially odd about anyone receiving contradictory results from antigen tests (let alone “extremely bogus”).
We wish Musk a speedy recovery, in any event. If in fact, he does have it.
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