The comment seemed to be making reference to rust's safety guarantees about undefined behaviour like use after free.
Linus' seems to have a completely different definition of "safey" that conflates allocation failures, indexing out of bounds, and division by zero with memory safety. Rust makes no claims about those problems, and the comment clearly refers to undefined behaviour. Obviously, those other problems are real problems, but just not ones that Rust claims to solve.
Edit: Reading the chain further along, it increasingly feels like Linus is aruging against a strawman.
The rules of arugment existed long before the linux kernel. You don't get to change terms introduced within a arugment with a clear meaning because it helps you create a strawman. If you want to change the definition of a term mid arugment, you telegraph it. Once again, this is called conflation.