Veterinarians use the painkiller ketamine to anesthetize horses before medical procedures. The American entrepreneur Elon Musk (52) is significantly smaller than a horse and as far as is known, he is not currently preparing for an operation or anything similar. Nevertheless, Musk apparently likes to take ketamine regularly. The richest person in the world, who, among other things, has shares in the companies X (formerly Twitter) and Tesla is therefore also one of the higher people in the world. This is reported by the “Wall Street Journal”. Musk’s drug use has now reached a level that is worrying those around him.
It’s not just about Musk’s health, but also about his sanity as a businessman. The “Wall Street Journal” writes that former Tesla boss Linda Johnson Rice (65) was “so frustrated” by Musk’s “volatile behavior and drug use” that she consciously decided not to continue her management career at Tesla in 2019 .
Musk smokes weed in public
Basically, Musk’s interest in drugs is no secret. He has smoked marijuana in public before; and he says he takes ketamine because a doctor prescribed it to him. In fact, ketamine has been used to cure mental illnesses for years.
However, documented and unsubstantiated anecdotes about Musk’s party behavior indicate that the 52-year-old Musk uses ketamine and other psychoactive substances less out of health necessity than out of hedonistic joy in experimenting. In 2018, he is said to have taken acid at an event he organized in Los Angeles. In 2019 he turned to magic mushrooms in Mexico. In 2021, he took ketamine at a party at Art Basel. The Wall Street Journal quotes “people close to Musk” as saying there are concerns that Musk’s drug use could harm his business success.
“Why is Musk so unfunny?”
Not only because Musk regularly behaves in a decidedly irrational manner in public, for example in jokes with little punchline that he publishes on the short message service X. The American “Rolling Stone Magazine” dedicated an entire article to the question “Why is Musk so unfunny?” Last year, Forbes magazine counted 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 SpaceX founder’s consumption of illegal drugs particularly problematic. One of Musk’s lawyers now emphasized that Musk is regularly subjected to drug tests at SpaceX and that they are always negative.