A tech mogul who has been a vocal critic of coronavirus vaccines claimed he offered a woman he was sitting next to on a plane $100k if she'd remove her face mask.
Steve Kirsch was one of the inventors of the optical mouse, the ones that use light and sensors to detect movement rather than the mechanical ones which roll a ball around.
Since then he's also founded a bunch of other tech companies, but when the coronavirus pandemic hit he started getting into the anti-vaccine scene.
In 2021 he was asked to step down from the board of one of his own companies after he claimed that Covid vaccines were 'toxic' and alleging that one in 1,000 people who had taken them had died from them.
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He went on to claim that vaccines 'kill more people than they save' and got banned permanently from publishing platform Medium, claiming that he'd been kicked off for 'telling the truth'.
Among the alternative treatments to coronavirus that he advocated for over vaccines was ivermectin, the horse dewormer.
Well he's back and claimed on social media that he was recently on a plane when he made one of his fellow passengers a mega-money offer to ditch her face mask.
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A plane is one of the easiest environments for a disease to spread around in, but taking to Twitter Kirsch wrote: "I am on board a Delta flight right now.
"The person sitting next to me in first class refused $100,000 to remove her mask for the entire flight. No joke.
"This was after I explained they don’t work. She works for a pharma company."
The tech mogul then said he actually started the bidding at $100 before upping his offer until he was willing to pay her a whopping $100k if she'd just remove the face mask.
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He also claimed that his fellow passenger on the plane had been removing her mask periodically to eat and drink.
Kirsch then said on his next flight he might be sitting next to someone who had an account with Silicon Valley Bank, you know, that bank that just collapsed massively.
He came in for plenty of criticism for bothering his fellow passenger, and for his continued crusade against the face mask, even though they have been proven to work.
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One person called him a 'jerk' and sarcastically tweeted 'I'm sure she appreciated the harassment', while another asked if he had a habit of 'offering money to random women to remove coverings from their bodies'.
Someone else slammed Kirsch as 'wildly creepy' for making the offer, while others suggested that the woman 'likely does not exist' and the whole thing was a way for him to claim face masks didn't work.
Plenty of others joked that they wanted to sit next to Kirsch on their next flight now they knew he was handing out $100k for something as simple as removing a face mask, with people calling on him to 'provide your upcoming flight schedule and seat numbers'.
Joe Harker