SpaceX CEO Elon Musk had to follow his space company's historic Crew-1 launch on Sunday evening from the comfort of his own home.

That's because he's likely come down with COVID-19.

"Two tests came back negative, two came back positive," the mercurial billionaire tweeted on November 13. "Same machine, same test, same nurse."

Musk also took the opportunity to voice skepticism surrounding the validity of COVID-19 testing. "Something extremely bogus is going on," he wrote.

Musk has been an outspoken skeptic of the ongoing global pandemic. He previously called the early panic surrounding the pandemic "dumb" and also infamously predicted there to be "close to zero new cases" by the "end of April."

In September, he even told The New York Times that he won't get a vaccine for him and his family. "I’m not at risk for COVID, nor are my kids," Musk said.

In light of all the public health chaos he's sown, the internet has now bequeathed him with the derogatory nickname "Space Karen."

The term even hit Twitter's influential "trending" box, The Independent reports.

Antigen tests, the ones Musk called into question on Friday, can be completed in a matter of hours, but are less accurate and should therefore be used as a screening tool rather than a diagnostic one. PCR tests take longer, but are far more accurate.

"Rapid antigen tests trade sensitivity for speed," Emma Bell, bioinformatics postdoc student, noted in a reply on Twitter. "They return a result in <30 minutes, but can only detect COVID-19 when you're absolutely riddled with it."

"What's bogus is that Space Karen didn't read up on the test before complaining to his millions of followers," they explained.

On Saturday, Musk took to Twitter to clarify the situation surrounding his health — but, like a raging Karen in a checkout line, succeeded only in muddying the waters further.

"Am getting wildly different results from different labs, but most likely I have a moderate case of COVID," he tweeted. "My symptoms are that of a minor cold, which is no surprise, since a coronavirus is a type of cold."

That's false, of course — though other coronaviruses do cause types of the common cold, COVID can be far more severe. In fact, more than a million people have already died from it worldwide.

READ MORE: Elon Musk forced to watch historic SpaceX launch from home and mocked as ‘Space Karen’ after catching Covid [The Independent]

More on Musk: Elon Musk Tests Positive For COVID


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