It’s slightly ironic that the one of the golden poster-children of Silicon Valley fame, fortune and success is calling bluff on what the World Health Organization is labeling a Global Public Health Emergency.
I think it’s safe to say that Elon Musk might be displaying a hint of what behavioral psychologists like to call “incentive-caused-bias” in his dangerously terse assessment of the fast-traveling virus that has taken the lives of nearly 4000 people. Having said that, I am pretty sure that if we all ran multi-billion-dollar moonshots, we would have conflicting feelings over the severity of economy-shattering pandemics.
Normally the Silicon Valley type are the ones who are privately peddling and preparing for the coming apocalypse where there will be a need for nuclear bomb-proof bunkers and multi-million-dollar New Zealand hideouts, but alas, a global pandemic that has put more than 60 million people under lock-down fails to fit the bill. It’s possible that Mr. Musk will change his opinion when San Francisco or Los Angeles take similar overreaching steps to contain the virus like Italy took over the weekend, where the government effectively put nearly 16 million people on lock-down.
At the end of the day, the silver-lining to all this virus-fueled fear is an economic one that works to Mr. Musk’s advantage. Just think of how easy it will be for his Tesla salespeople to pitch the $500 Tesla HEPA Filter and Bioweapon Defense Mode add-on! Who needs an ugly mask when you can fashionably quarantine yourself inside your Tesla all day?
Faisaling.com 
Leave a comment