Bill Gates Blasts Elon Musk, Asks Him To Stop Talking About COVID-19

Bill Gates has been a subject of several COVID-19 controversies since the coronavirus pandemic outbreak. This, despite his consistent efforts to back the development of a vaccine and provide relief efforts in the crisis.?

Bill Gates blames all the conspiracies against him due to the spread of misinformation through social media.?And he even points out Elon Musk for it.

Bill Gates (Image: Reuters)

With Musk having a tendency to have an opinion on anything and everything, Gates subtly told the tech icon to stick to his craft.

“Elon’s positioning is to maintain a high level of outrageous comments,” Gates said in a recent?interview with CNBC. “He’s not much involved in vaccines. He makes a great electric car. And his rockets work well. So he’s allowed to say these things. I hope that he doesn’t confuse areas he’s not involved in too much.”

Many might call it a befitting reply to Musk’s Twitter outbreaks calling for a “Free America” and an opening of the economy despite the rising COVID-19 related deaths in the US.

Bill Gates, however, pointed out to a bigger picture here of which Musk was just a small part.

COVID-19 misinformation crisis

In the interview, Bill Gates pointed out how COVID-19 misinformation had a tendency to spread faster than the truth on social media platforms.

“When you let people communicate, you have to deal with the fact that certain incorrect things that are very titillating can spread very rapidly compared to the truth. And we’ve always seen that with vaccines,” Gates said.

Elon Musk (Image: Reuters)

In comparison, facts travel slowly on social media. The simple disparity makes it difficult for companies like Facebook and Twitter to strike a balance, Gates said.

Rightly so, as there have been ample incidents of the same, involving high profile individuals nonetheless. A recent example is the feud between the US President Donald Trump and Twitter over some misinformation put out on the microblogging platform by the POTUS.

So naturally, Elon Musk is not the only one in this league, and Bill Gates is right about the notorious use of social media for COVID-19 misinformation.

That is why the Microsoft co-founder does not pay much heed to what is shared on such platforms. Rubbishing the conspiracy claims earlier, he had said, “It’s almost hard to deny this stuff because it’s so stupid or strange that to even repeat it almost seems to give it credibility.”