Not unsurprisingly, the new year started with another Elon Musk scandal. This time, according to The Wall Street Journal, it’s about the alleged use of “recreational” drugs.
The world’s richest person has done drugs, says the Journal, at private parties where those attending signed nondisclosure agreements and did not take in their cellphones. Musk took acid in 2018 in Los Angeles, magic mushrooms in 2019 in Mexico, and used ketamine with his brother (and Tesla board member) Kimbal in Miami in 2021, it reported.
This “would likely be a violation of federal policies that could jeopardise SpaceX’s billions of dollars in government contracts”, the newspaper wrote. “Musk is intrinsic to the value of his companies, potentially putting at risk around $1-trillion in assets held by investors, tens of thousands of jobs and big parts of the US space programme.”
Former Tesla director Linda Johnson Rice “grew so frustrated with Musk’s volatile behaviour and her concerns about his drug use that she didn’t stand for re-election to the company’s board in 2019”.
Musk tweeted in August 2023 that “occasional use of ketamine is a much better option” than antidepressants. “I have a prescription for when my brain chemistry sometimes goes super negative,” he wrote.
Ketamine is a major dissociative anaesthetic used in surgery and effective in anaesthetising horses, a vet tells the FM.
Psychiatrists use small doses for treating severe depression, bad pain, post-traumatic stress disorder and bipolar disorder. It can be useful in the treatment of severe depression, a psychologist tells the FM.
Friends actor Matthew Perry died in October from “high levels of ketamine” that caused “cardiovascular overstimulation and respiratory depression”, according to an autopsy. As a drug — known as Special K — it induces out-of-body and near-death experiences.
The unrepentant owner of X, now worth a third of the $44bn he paid for it in October 2022, tweeted two days after the article appeared that “whatever I’m doing, I should obviously keep doing it”.
He wrote: “If drugs actually helped improve my net productivity over time, I would definitely take them!”
Musk infamously smoked a joint during a podcast recording with Joe Rogan in 2018. I tried to listen to the interview at the time, but after about 20 minutes I gave up. He was incoherent and rambling, made long pauses between words and just sounded stoned. The two-and-a-half hour YouTube video has been viewed 65-million times. I rewatched from 15 minutes for four minutes as he waffled through a description of AI.
“We are the biological bootloader for AI,” he says, adding “the AI isn’t formed by the human limbic system. The primal drives ... uh ... the things that we like ... and hate ... and fear ... they’re all there on the internet ... they’re a projection of our limbic system,” he stammers, then just stops talking. Rogan bursts out laughing.
The day after the Journal article appeared, Musk tweeted: “After that one puff with Rogan, I agreed, at Nasa’s request, to do three years of random drug testing. Not even trace quantities were found of any drugs or alcohol.”
In the age of Lance Armstrong’s years-long avoidance of drug tests, that doesn’t necessarily mean much.
I don’t care if grown-ups take drugs. But the US government, which relies on SpaceX, and other investors do seem to be concerned. Musk’s “shadow rule” — as The New Yorker described it last August — has created a “degree of dependency that the US now has on Musk in a variety of fields, from the future of energy and transportation to the exploration of space”.
Suddenly his irrational behaviour and impulsive decisions since he bought X can be seen in a different and troubling light. Drug use could also explain Musk’s notorious lack of sleep, often cited as the cause of his impulsivity and irrationality.
How should we view his “the actual truth” antisemitic tweet last November that caused high-profile advertisers to ditch X?
Or posts glorifying Nazis that appeared next to advertising by IBM, Apple and Oracle, for which he victim-blamed and sued the hate speech group which highlighted these?
Or the appearance of Musk — who calls himself X’s “chief troll officer” — onstage at a New York Times investor event, where he ranted at those departing advertisers: “Don’t advertise,” before telling them: “Go fuck yourself”?