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At model Heidi Klum's Halloween party in 2022, Elon Musk appeared in a buckle tank outfit that left room for elbow room.
Photograph:
Noam Galai / AFP / Getty Images
Veterinarians use the painkiller ketamine to numb horses before medical procedures. The American entrepreneur Elon Musk is significantly smaller than a horse and, as far as is known, he is not currently preparing for an operation or the like. Nevertheless, Musk likes to take ketamine regularly. The richest person in the world, who holds shares in companies X (formerly Twitter) and Tesla, among others, is consequently also one of the higher people in the world. As the Wall Street Journal reported over the weekend, Musk's drug use has now reached a level that worries those around him.
This is not only about Musk's state of health, but also about his sanity as a businessman. The Wall Street Journal writes that former Tesla CEO Linda Johnson Rice was "so frustrated" by Musk's "volatile behavior and drug use" that she deliberately refrained from continuing her leadership career at Tesla in 2019.
Musk smokes pot in public
Basically, Musk's interest in drugs is no secret. He has already smoked marijuana in public and he takes ketamine, according to his own statements, because a doctor prescribed it for him. In fact, ketamine has been used to cure mental illness for years.
However, proven and unsubstantiated anecdotes about Musk's partying behavior suggest that the 52-year-old Musk turns to ketamine and other psychoactive substances less out of health necessity than out of hedonistic experimentation. In 2018, for example, he is said to have taken acid at an event he hosted in Los Angeles. In 2019, he turned to magic mushrooms in Mexico. In 2021, he reached for ketamine at a party as part of Art Basel. The Wall Street Journal quotes "people close to Musk" as saying that there are concerns that Musk's drug use could damage his entrepreneurial success.
"Why is Musk so unfunny?"
Not only because Musk regularly behaves in an emphatically irrational manner in public, for example in jokes with few punchlines, which he publishes on the short message service X. The American Rolling Stone magazine devoted an article to the question "Why is Musk so unfunny?" This year, Forbes' magazine listed how many of his joke posts Musk had stolen from X users (four on a Saturday in February alone).
But also because Musk's space company "Space X" cooperates with the American state, which is likely to make the consumption of illegal drugs by the Space X founder particularly problematic. One of Musk's lawyers now emphasized that Musk is regularly subjected to drug tests at "Space X" and that these are always negative.