He forcibly and potentially illegally gained access to wildly sensitive government data that he hired a bunch of unvetted 20-somethings to oversee ― and he was potentially blitzed out of his mind at the same time.
Just days after tech billionaire Elon Musk officially left his role as a top adviser to President Donald Trump, The New York Times reported that the tech mogul was consuming large quantities of drugs around the same time he became a fixture on the campaign trail.
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Citing private messages obtained by the Times and interviews with Musk’s associates, the outlet reported that Musk took ketamine, ecstasy, psychedelic mushrooms, Ambien, Adderall, and other drugs, and travelled with a daily medication box that held about 20 pills.
The CEO of SpaceX and Tesla reportedly took so much Ketamine, a dissociative anesthetic known to induce schizophrenia-like symptoms, that it affected his bladder function.
The report is bolstered by a January 2024 Wall Street Journal investigation in which sources close to Musk said they’d witnessed or had direct knowledge of him using LSD, cocaine, ecstasy, mushrooms and ketamine.
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Musk’s attorney Alex Spiro told the Journal at the time that his client is “regularly and randomly drug tested at SpaceX” and has “never failed a test.”
It’s unclear how, or whether, Musk’s consumption habits changed once he became a federal bureaucrat with an office in the White House complex. He didn’t address the claims directly at a Friday afternoon press conference in the Oval Office, instead attacking the credibility of The New York Times itself.
But he’s continued drawing attention for unusual antics, including a chainsaw-wielding appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference and a Nazi-like hand gesture at Trump’s inaugural rally.
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In April, Representative Mikie Sherrill introduced a bill that would require Musk and his hires at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency to undergo regular drug testing, though the bill has gone nowhere in the Republican-majority house.
“Donald Trump has given billionaire Elon Musk the keys to our government, and with it, access to highly sensitive information — from Treasury and Social Security data to even our most guarded military plans,” Sherrill wrote in a press release. “Those with access to sensitive information must be thoroughly vetted, clear-eyed, and exercise good judgment.”
Asked on Friday if he was concerned about drug use by Musk, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller was dismissive ― but notably didn’t rule it out.
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“The drugs that we’re concerned about are the drugs running across the southern border,” he told reporters.
The eccentric billionaire has openly discussed his ketamine use in the past. In a 2024 interview with Don Lemon, he said he took “a small amount” every other week ― but got miffed when Lemon pushed him on it.
“If you’ve used too much ketamine, you can’t really get work done, and I have a lot of work,” he told the journalist at the time.
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An Atlantic article describing the drug’s effects on the body found people build tolerance to it very quickly, requiring ever larger doses to achieve the same high and leading to long-term impaired cognition, including “delusional thinking, superstitious beliefs, and a sense of specialness and importance.”
Those would seem to strike a chord with Sam Harris, a public intellectual and former friend of Musk, who publicly broke with the world’s richest man in a post earlier this year.
“Any dispassionate observer of Elon’s behaviour on Twitter/X can see that there is something seriously wrong with his moral compass, if not his perception of reality,” he wrote.
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