Did Covid Fry Elon’s Brain?

ByJames McCallef
Elon Musk speaking at a podium

We rated 60 of Elon Musk’s public statements, from 2011 to 2026, as intelligent, unclear or unhinged. The unhinged ones pile up from one point: March 2020, the first weeks of the Covid pandemic. Before 2020 we rated 2 of his 30 statements unhinged; from 2020 onward, 20 of 30.

Covid is the obvious suspect, and the science says it can dent reasoning. The record can’t say when he first caught it. The run of unhinged statements starts in March 2020, while the virus spread through the US largely untested; the first infection he reported, in November 2020, came with symptoms “of a minor cold” and mixed rapid-test results. Every rating is in the table at the end.

Elon Musk outside Twitter headquarters

What the statement ratings found

The COVID theory has a sound reason for being asked. In a 2024 study reported by STAT, Imperial College London researchers gave eight cognitive tasks to more than 112,000 people in England. Compared with participants who had not been infected, people whose COVID symptoms resolved in four to 12 weeks scored lower by the equivalent of roughly three IQ points. The gap was six points for symptoms lasting longer than 12 weeks and nine for those who had been hospitalized.

Lead author Adam Hampshire, professor of restorative neurosciences at Imperial College London, said:

“Brain fog can correlate with objectively measurable deficits in a person’s actual memory and executive task performance.”, Adam Hampshire

Our statement ratings initially look consistent with a sudden change. Of 30 statements before 2020, we rated 21 intelligent, two unhinged and seven unclear. Of 30 from 2020 onward, we rated six intelligent, 20 unhinged and four unclear.

The infection timeline

On January 7, 2020, Musk was on stage at Tesla’s Shanghai factory, dancing in front of a jumping crowd, a week after Wuhan reported its cluster of pneumonia cases caused by the new virus. The WHO declared a pandemic on March 11. The first wave reached Europe in late February and the US about two weeks later.

Musk’s first unhinged statement came on March 6, 2020, as that wave arrived, when he called coronavirus panic “dumb”; later that month he predicted close to zero new US cases by the end of April. The virus was already spreading untested: CDC antibody studies later found actual infections ran 6 to 24 times the reported count in some US regions.

The first infection Musk reported came in November 2020. He said he “most likely” had a moderate case, with symptoms “that of a minor cold”, after two positive and two negative rapid tests, and called coronavirus “a type of cold”. He disclosed no laboratory PCR result. That November result is the first test he disclosed, not necessarily his first infection: his March statements came in the weeks when most American cases were never tested.

What he did with it

Musk was outspoken, and on Twitter, long before 2020. “Funding secured” and the “pedo guy” insult were both tweets, in 2018. The platform and the volume stayed the same; what he said on it changed.

After Musk bought Twitter in 2022, the consequences of his posts reached the business he owned. Following his November 2023 endorsement of the post about Jewish communities, advertisers including Disney and Apple suspended campaigns. At the November 29 DealBook Summit, he accused advertisers trying to leave of blackmail and told them, “Go f— yourself.”

At that same event, Musk called his posts concerning Jewish communities among the most foolish things he had done on X, apologized, and denied being antisemitic. The apology and the attack on advertisers came from the same stage.

His reach later extended into government. WIRED identified six young DOGE engineers aged 19 to 24, including one who appeared to have recently finished high school; agency staff told WIRED one of them joined calls where employees had to explain their code and justify their jobs. NBC News reported DOGE’s access to sensitive federal systems. University of Michigan public-policy professor Don Moynihan, who was not involved in DOGE, told WIRED that people outside ordinary public-office accountability were gaining access to some of government’s most sensitive data.

Musk’s project promised enormous cuts. In August 2026, the Government Accountability Office checked $110 billion of savings DOGE claimed from contracts, grants and leases and found problems with their transparency and reliability. DOGE’s wider tally was $215 billion. Of 13,476 contracts it claimed to have terminated, the GAO found no termination action on 2,503. For leases, DOGE claimed $113 million saved; the reviewed leases added up to $53.5 million, a $59.5 million gap between the two figures. The GAO said some leases were already being terminated before DOGE existed.

Illustration comparing DOGE’s $113 million lease-savings claim with $53.5 million in reviewed leases

There is a financial contrast here, too. A Washington Post analysis reported by Fortune found that Musk’s companies had collected at least $38 billion through government contracts, loans, subsidies and tax credits. On June 12, 2026, Forbes estimated that SpaceX’s public-market valuation had made him the first person to reach an estimated $1 trillion in wealth. He fell back below $1 trillion within two weeks. Public money helped build businesses whose owner was then entrusted with finding government waste.

His politics moved in the same years. In 2016, Musk said Trump lacked the character to represent the United States well, while praising Hillary Clinton’s economic and environmental policies. In February 2022, he complained that President Joe Biden was ignoring Tesla; the White House praised Tesla’s electric-vehicle work but disputed parts of Musk’s account. Musk declared that May he would vote Republican.

In July 2022, Musk said Trump should “sail into the sunset”. He endorsed him in July 2024. Musk’s explanation that “the left moved” speaks to his view of Democrats; it does not explain away his own stated reversals on Trump and climate urgency.

Many of the statements we rated unhinged after 2020 are aimed at someone: the advertisers told to “go f — yourself”, the daughter he said was “killed by the woke mind virus”, the Britons told “violence is coming to you”. Musk has his own word for the quality that holds most people back from saying such things. He told Joe Rogan in February 2025 that “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.”

The research on Covid and the brain points at that same quality. A study of 785 people in UK Biobank, scanned before and after infection, found that those who caught Covid lost more grey matter in the orbitofrontal cortex than those who did not, and showed greater cognitive decline. The effect held when the hospitalised cases were excluded, so mild infections did it too. The orbitofrontal cortex is one of the brain regions that governs emotional and social behaviour. Damage there costs people empathy: a study of brain-injury patients found that those whose injuries reached the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which takes in the lower orbitofrontal cortex, were significantly impaired in empathy compared with patients injured elsewhere in the brain. Musk calls empathy a virus. The question his record raises is whether a virus took some of his.

By our ratings, Musk went from 2 unhinged statements in 30 before 2020 to 20 in 30 after, starting in the first weeks of the pandemic. Covid can damage the brain region that carries empathy, and Musk now calls empathy civilisation’s fundamental weakness. Every rating is in the table below.

The full ratings

Every statement we rated, in date order, with a source for each. All 60 are in the counts above.

DateStatementTopicOur ratingSource
Apr 2011SpaceX could put people on Mars in 10–20 yearsSpaceIntelligentAFP
Mar 2011Tesla sued BBC Top Gear for libel, saying its Roadster test was stagedMedia / conductIntelligentBloomberg
2012Asked Neil Armstrong to give private spaceflight a chance, after Armstrong and Cernan criticised commercial spaceflightSpaceIntelligentNBC News
Oct 2012Said Romney was wrong to call Tesla a "loser" in a presidential debateUS politicsIntelligentGreen Car Reports
Nov 2012Plan for a self-sustaining colony of 80,000 people on MarsSpaceUnclearSilicon Republic
Feb 2013Accused a New York Times reviewer of making up data in a bad Model S test driveMediaIntelligentMaclean's
Mar 2013"I would like to die on Mars, just not on impact"SpaceIntelligentHuffPost
Jun 201390-second battery swap for the Model S; swap stations to open soonEVsUnclearGreen Car Reports
Aug 2013Hyperloop: an open design for a tube train from Los Angeles to San Francisco in about 30 minutesTransportIntelligentNational Geographic
Oct 2013Called hydrogen fuel cell cars a dead end ("fool cells")EVs / energyIntelligentThe Truth About Cars
Jun 2014"All our patents belong to you" (Tesla opens its patents)EVsIntelligentIndustryWeek
Aug 2014AI is "potentially more dangerous than nukes"AI riskIntelligentCNBC
Oct 2014With AI "we are summoning the demon"AI riskIntelligentFortune
Dec 2015Only a carbon tax will speed the exit from fossil fuels; make it revenue-neutral and phased inClimate / taxIntelligentFortune
Jun 2016Chance we live in base reality is "one in billions"SimulationUnclearTechCrunch
Oct 2016A Tesla will drive itself from LA to New York by end of 2017Self-drivingUnclearCleanTechnica
Oct 2016To the media: "If you dissuade people from using an autonomous vehicle, you are killing people"Self-drivingIntelligentCNBC
Nov 2016Trump is probably "not the right guy"; Clinton's economic and environmental policies are rightUS politicsIntelligentInverse
Nov 2016 – Feb 2017Automation will make universal basic income "necessary"EconomyIntelligentBusiness Insider
Jan 2017Trump's travel ban on some Muslim-majority countries is "not the best way" to address US challengesImmigrationIntelligentCNBC
Jan 2017Stayed on Trump's councils: "Simply attacking him will achieve nothing"US politicsIntelligentElectrek
Jun 2017Left Trump's councils: "Climate change is real"ClimateIntelligentCNBC
Jul 2017"The world's population is accelerating towards collapse, but few seem to notice or care"DemographicsUnclearFortune
May 2018Big media publish "only enough to sugarcoat the lie"; said Trump was elected because nobody believes reportersMediaUnclearCNBC
May 2018Proposed a public site to rate the credibility of each journalist, maybe called "Pravda"MediaIntelligentCNN
Jul 2018Called the cave rescue diver "pedo guy"ConductUnclearNBC News
Aug 2018"Funding secured" (Tesla private at $420)BusinessIntelligentCarscoops
Oct 2018"The Shortseller Enrichment Commission is doing incredible work"Business conductUnhingedMediaite
Apr 2019"Next year for sure, we'll have over a million robotaxis on the road"Self-drivingUnhingedCNBC
Aug 2019"I support Yang" (Democratic candidate); UBI is "obviously needed"US politicsIntelligentCNBC
6 Mar 2020"The coronavirus panic is dumb"COVIDUnhingedCNBC
19 Mar 2020"Probably close to zero new cases in US too by end of April"COVIDUnhingedMediaite
19 Mar 2020"0% chance of anything close" to Imperial College's 2.2 million US death estimateCOVIDUnhingedBusiness Insider
29 Apr 2020"FREE AMERICA NOW" and "Give people their freedom back!"COVIDUnhingedMediaite
Nov 2020"Coronavirus is a type of cold" (while he probably had it)COVIDUnhingedGulf News
May 2021Tesla stopped taking Bitcoin because of fossil fuel use in miningCryptoIntelligentCBS News
Feb 2022Activated Starlink in Ukraine and sent terminalsUkraineIntelligentAutoblog
Mar 2022Free speech is essential to a functioning democracyFree speechIntelligentFortune
May 2022Voted Democrat before, will now vote RepublicanParty politicsUnclearMediaite
3 Oct 2022Peace plan: Crimea formally part of Russia, Ukraine stays neutralUkraineUnhingedAl Jazeera
Oct 2022"If you care about the people of Ukraine, seek peace"UkraineUnclearAutoblog
Dec 2022"My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci"COVID / cultureUnhingedCBS News
Mar 2023Signed the open letter for a 6-month pause on AI systems more powerful than GPT-4AI riskIntelligentSemafor
Nov 2023"The actual truth" (reply to a post about Jewish communities)Antisemitism rowUnhingedJerusalem Post
Nov 2023Told advertisers who left X to "go f — yourself"BusinessUnhingedFortune
Apr 2024AI smarter than any one human "probably around the end of next year"AIUnhingedFortune
Jul 2024"I fully endorse President Trump"US politicsUnhingedMediaite
Jul 2024His estranged child was "killed by the woke mind virus"Gender / cultureUnhingedFortune
4 Aug 2024"Civil war is inevitable" (UK riots)UKUnhingedFortune
Dec 2024"Only the AfD can save Germany"EuropeUnhingedNBC News
Feb 2025Held a chainsaw at CPAC as a symbol of cuts to bureaucracyGovernmentUnhingedNBC News
2025DOGE could cut $1–2 trillion from federal spendingGovernmentUnhingedNBC News
28 Feb 2025"Social Security is the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time"WelfareUnhingedPolitiFact
Jun 2025Trump's spending bill is a "disgusting abomination"Fiscal policyIntelligentArise
Jun 2025Linked Trump to the Epstein files (post later deleted)US politicsIntelligentNTN24
Jun 2025Said his posts about Trump "went too far"US politicsUnclearArise
Jul 2025Announced the "America Party"US politicsUnclearAl Jazeera
13 Sep 2025"Whether you choose violence or not, violence is coming to you" (London rally)UKUnhingedRTHK / AFP
13 Sep 2025Called for dissolution of the UK parliament and a change of governmentUKUnhingedRTHK / AFP
Jan 2026"2026 is going to be amazing!" (after dinner with Trump)US politicsUnhingedArise

Further Reading