David Geffen was scolded on social media Saturday over an Instagram post the billionaire record industry mogul shared about how he is handling the global coronavirus pandemic.
The founder of Geffen Records posted a photograph of a multi-story yacht captioned to say he was safe at sea in the Caribbean as the coronavirus ravages most countries on Earth.
“Sunset last night…,” Mr. Geffen wrote on Instagram. “isolated in the Grenadines avoiding the virus. I’m hoping everybody is staying safe.”
Mr. Geffen accordingly prompted outrage across social media on other platform like Twitter, where several users with verified and widely followed accounts shared screenshots of his Instagram post.
Lauren Collins, a writer for The New Yorker, tweeted an image of Mr. Geffen’s post that she captioned simply “psychopath.”
Sven Henrich, the founder of the NorthamTrader financial site, tweeted that Mr. Geffen was effectively saying in the post: “You poor plebs can suck it. It’s fabulous to be rich. Look at me!”
Each of the tweets had been shared by other users on Twitter, or retweeted, several hundred times within hours of being posted.
Mr. Geffen’s account on Instagram had been set to private as of early Saturday afternoon, meanwhile.
Mr. Geffen, 77, started labels including Asylum Records, Geffen Records and DGC Records, and he is also among the co-founders of the DreamWorks Pictures film production studio.
Forbes has placed Mr. Geffen’s net worth at more than $7.7 billion.
Internationally, more than 620,000 cases of COVID-19, the infectious respiratory disease caused by the coronavirus, have been confirmed across more than 150 countries and counting since it was discovered in late December, according to a tally kept by Johns Hopkins University.
More than 28,000 people have died from the disease, according to Johns Hopkins.
• Andrew Blake can be reached at ablake@washingtontimes.com.
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