FRIDAY: Has something been wrong with Elon Musk?

FRIDAY, MAY 30, 2025

Two portraits in the Times: In this morning's report, we made a fleeting reference to Elon Musk's (long acknowledged) ketamine use. We hadn't yet seen the profile of Musk which is now online at the New York Times.

As noted in the Times report, ketamine can have valid medical uses—but ketamine can also be abused. This is how the news report starts in the New York Times:

On the Campaign Trail, Elon Musk Juggled Drugs and Family Drama

As Elon Musk became one of Donald J. Trump’s closest allies last year, leading raucous rallies and donating about $275 million to help him win the presidency, he was also using drugs far more intensely than previously known, according to people familiar with his activities.

Mr. Musk’s drug consumption went well beyond occasional use. He told people he was taking so much ketamine, a powerful anesthetic, that it was affecting his bladder, a known effect of chronic use. He took Ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms. And he traveled with a daily medication box that held about 20 pills, including ones with the markings of the stimulant Adderall, according to a photo of the box and people who have seen it.

It is unclear whether Mr. Musk, 53, was taking drugs when he became a fixture at the White House this year and was handed the power to slash the federal bureaucracy. But he has exhibited erratic behavior, insulting cabinet members, gesturing like a Nazi and garbling his answers in a staged interview.

He traveled with jagged little pills, according to this report. 

In our view, it would have been better editing to say that Musk seemed to "gesture like a Nazi" at the inaugural event in question. We would have made that edit. 

That said, the new report goes into substantial detail about Musk's alleged drug use, generally according to people who go unnamed. One passage, for example, says this:

Mr. Musk had been using ketamine often, sometimes daily, and mixing it with other drugs, according to people familiar with his consumption. The line between medical use and recreation was blurry, troubling some people close to him.

He also took Ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms at private gatherings across the United States and in at least one other country, according to those who attended the events.

The Food and Drug Administration has formally approved the use of ketamine only as an anesthetic in medical procedures. Doctors with a special license may prescribe it for psychiatric disorders like depression. But the agency has warned about its risks, which came into sharp relief after the death of the actor Matthew Perry. The drug has psychedelic properties and can cause dissociation from reality. Chronic use can lead to addiction and problems with bladder pain and control.

"The drug can cause dissociation from reality?" Does that, or does that not, sound like Elon Musk?

 (Full disclosure: Two months after Musk's possible Nazi salute, he reposted a message on X which said, “Hitler didn’t murder millions of people. Public sector employees did.”) 

Hitler didn't do it! It was the bureaucrats! So it went with the person described in that news report, but also in this beautifully composed new column by Michelle Goldberg:

Elon Musk’s Legacy Is Disease, Starvation and Death

There is an Elon Musk post on X, his social media platform, that should define his legacy. “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper,” he wrote on Feb. 3. He could have “gone to some great parties. Did that instead.”

The column starts with a punishing headline. But so said this weirdly reckless man, one of the world's biggest stumblebums and one of the era's most uncaring public figures.

Let's hope that Musk was wrecked on drugs! That would at least present a recognizable reason for his endlessly error-riddled behaviors and for his endless lack of concern.

Did this guy ever have the slightest idea what he was actually doing? Continuing directly from above, Goldberg offers this:

Musk’s absurd scheme to save the government a trillion dollars by slashing “waste, fraud and abuse” has been a failure. The Department of Government Efficiency claims it’s saved $175 billion, but experts believe the real number is significantly lower. Meanwhile, according to the Partnership for Public Service, which studies the federal work force, DOGE’s attacks on government personnel—its firings, re-hirings, use of paid administrative leave and all the associated lack of productivity—could cost the government upward of $135 billion this fiscal year, even before the price of defending DOGE’s actions in court. Musk’s rampage through the bureaucracy may not have created any savings at all, and if it did, they were negligible.

There is one place, however, where Musk, with the help of his minions, achieved his goals. He did indeed shred the United States Agency for International Development. Though a rump operation is now operating inside the State Department, the administration says that it has terminated more than 80 percent of U.S.A.I.D. grants. Brooke Nichols, an associate professor of global health at Boston University, has estimated that these cuts have already resulted in about 300,000 deaths, most of them of children, and will most likely lead to significantly more by the end of the year. That is what Musk’s foray into politics accomplished.

White House officials deny that their decimation of U.S.A.I.D. has had fatal consequences. At a hearing in the House last week, Democrats confronted Secretary of State Marco Rubio with my colleague Nicholas Kristof’s reporting from East Africa, documenting suffering and death caused by the withdrawal of aid. Rubio insisted no such deaths have happened, but people who’ve been in the field say he’s either lying or misinformed.

We can't vouch for the perfect accuracy of any of those figures. Having said that, we'll ask you this:

Aside from a fellow like Rubio, can anyone swear that the estimate by Brooke Nichols is actually wrong?

We hope that Musk was stoned on ketamine, with an attendant loss of connection to reality. That would help explain how someone who once built several major companies could be such a shipwreck today.

His stumblebum conduct was on full display throughout the course of his sojourn inside the government. But as with the bizarre behaviors of President Trump, so too here:

Again and again, over and over, Blue America's major news orgs seemed to feel that they must look away.

Today's report in the Times is hardly the first in which associates of Musk were quoted voicing concern about his drug use. On April 3, we linked you to three such reports—to major reports in The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker and The Atlantic over the past several years.

As we noted, those reports generated zero discussion within Blue America's upper-end press and pundit corps. As with the current president's endless array of peculiar statements and clams, so too here:

There was nothing to look at! Move right along! There was nothing to see here! 

So our stars perhaps seemed to say.

Have Elon Musk's chaotic cuts "already resulted in about 300,000 deaths, most of them of children?"

We can't vouch for any such number. Having said that, we can ask you this:

Have our major organs been up to the task of even pretending to care?