Elon Musk has never been particularly good at public speaking. He’s constantly stumbling over his own words, repeating himself, and forgetting key talking points. Every time I’ve seen a new Tesla unveil, I’ve thought to myself that he looks like he was randomly selected from the crowd and told to give a speech on a topic he was only tangentially familiar with. More people suffer from glossophobia, a fear of public speaking, than they fear death. Maybe he’s afraid. Or maybe he’s tired, or hungover, or stressed. Or maybe it’s a consistent and ongoing propensity for drug abuse.
A recent Wall Street Journal exposé voices the concerns of executives and board members within Musk’s many companies, that Elon’s use of LSD, cocaine, ecstasy, psilocybin, marijuana, and ketamine are affecting his ability to run those companies effectively. His behavior has long been described as volatile and unstable, but SpaceX employees reportedly called out a specific 2017 all-hands meeting as the turning point, describing the meeting as “nonsensical,” “unhinged,” and “cringeworthy.”
In an effort to refute the claims, SpaceX tweeted the full one hour and thirteen minute meeting in full for everyone to watch. Evidently this is intended to refute a single sentence of the WSJ report; “SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell ultimately stepped in and took over the meeting.” While Shotwell was certainly on hand to keep the meeting at least aimed in the right direction, Musk was the driving force for the full meeting. That doesn’t change the fact that he’s incomprehensible and difficult to follow for the entirety of the meeting. It’s a rough watch, I don’t recommend it. You’ve been warned.
Musk has said that he has a prescription for ketamine and we’ve all seen the video of him smoking (if you can call it that) weed on Joe Rogan’s podcast. Reports indicate that Musk occasionally hosts private parties “where attendees sign nondisclosure agreements or give up their phones to enter” and his drug use has been witnessed. He reportedly took acid at a party in Los Angeles in 2018, took mushrooms at a party in Mexico in 2019, and got blasted on ket at Art Basel in 2021. Steve Jurvetson, former Tesla and current SpaceX board member, says he’s done drugs with Elon.
It’s worth mentioning that Alex Spiro, Musk’s attorney, said that Elon is “regularly and randomly drug tested at SpaceX and has never failed a test.” But what’s the chain of custody on his pee?
Look, I’m not going to be the “Just say no” Richard Nixon war on drugs buzzkill around here and say that there are no circumstances under which drug use is okay. All I’m saying is that it’s a little disconcerting that the richest man in the world — who is singularly in control of several trillions of dollars of shareholder value and billions of tax-paid government contracts — can’t get his mind right. At a certain level Musk is Tesla, SpaceX, Boring Company, Twitter, Solar City, Neuralink, etc. and those companies are Musk.
