The Scientist Who Called Elon Musk ‘Space Karen’ Deserves a Medal

Is there a Nobel Prize for the sickest burn? Because if there is, Dr. Emma Bell needs to get one for calling Elon Musk “Space Karen,” something Musk should be forced to have printed on his stationery.

The thing I love about this story is it shows, once again, how dumb Elon Musk actually is. “Oh, he must be smart, he has two degrees from Penn, that’s an Ivy League school.” Donald Trump has a business degree from Penn and he bankrupted a casino, all going to an Ivy League school means is you had rich parents, which is basically the number one factor in being considered a genius by the public at large in 2020.

Here’s what happened. Elon Musk has COVID because karma is real, and he took four rapid antigen tests, two of which came back positive and two of which came back negative. The reason for this, in layman’s terms, is that rapid tests trade accuracy for speed, but the loss of accuracy is only in one direction; you can get a false negative but you shouldn’t ever get a false positive. This is a known behavior of this kind of test and the tests that take longer are less prone to inaccurate results.

Elon Musk mused that something must be wrong and wondered if “running too many cycles” could be causing false positives, which, no, it couldn’t, as Dr. Bell explained at length on Medium.

Musk went on to say that “coronavirus is a type of cold” which is backward as many common colds are caused by coronaviruses, but so are other, deadlier diseases like COVID-19.

But hey, who doesn’t want to put the guy who insisted he be allowed to force his employees to work during a deadly pandemic in charge of the Martian slave colony.