You’ve read about how the Trump White House was basically a pill mill, dispensing uppers and downers like candy and even handing out fentanyl for reasons no one has been able to explain. Right. Perfectly normal.
Look what’s been happening at Tesla, the company owned by the other Very Stable Genius, Elon Musk. The Wall Street Journal reports:
Several current or former directors at Tesla and SpaceX attend parties with him, go on exotic vacations and hang out at Burning Man, the Nevada arts and music festival.
Musk and these directors, including venture capitalists Gracias and Ira Ehrenpreis, tech mogul Larry Ellison, former media executive James Murdoch, as well as Musk’s brother, Kimbal Musk, have invested tens of millions of dollars in each other’s companies—Ellison held billions of dollars in Tesla shares with about a 1.5% holding in 2022. Some also received career support and help from Elon Musk.
Most members of Tesla’s current eight-person board have amassed shares worth hundreds of millions of dollars from their seats over the years, significantly more than what board members at other companies make for their service.
Tesla pays its directors mostly in stock options, and the current board, not including Musk himself, collectively has made more than $650 million selling shares from those options. They hold additional options valued at nearly $1 billion. Some directors agreed to return a portion of that compensation to Tesla to resolve a shareholder lawsuit about their compensation while denying any wrongdoing. A judge has yet to approve the settlement.
Some current and former Tesla and SpaceX directors have knowledge of Musk’s illegal drug use but haven’t taken public action, according to people who have witnessed the drug use or were briefed on it.
The Wall Street Journal reported in January that Musk has used drugs including cocaine, ecstasy, LSD and magic mushrooms, and that leaders at Tesla and SpaceX were concerned about it, particularly his recreational use of ketamine, for which Musk has said he has a prescription. The illegal drugs violate strict antidrug policies at Musk’s companies and could put SpaceX’s federal contracts and Musk’s security clearance at risk.
At the upscale Austin Proper Hotel, Musk has attended social gatherings in recent years with Tesla board member Joe Gebbia, the
Airbnb co-founder and a friend of his, where Musk took ketamine recreationally through a nasal spray bottle multiple times, according to people familiar with the drug use and the parties.
Other directors, Gracias, Jurvetson and Kimbal Musk, have consumed drugs with him, according to people who have witnessed the drug use and others with knowledge of it.
Musk and some people close to him, including Kimbal Musk, attend parties at Hotel El Ganzo, a boutique hotel in San José del Cabo, Mexico, known for its art and music scene as well as drug-fueled events, according to people familiar with the parties.
The volume of drug use by Musk and with board members has become concerning, some of these people said.
In the culture Musk has created around him, some friends, including directors, feel there is an expectation to consume drugs with him because they think refraining could upset the billionaire, who has made them a lot of money, some of the people said. More so, they don’t want to risk losing the social capital that comes from being close to Musk, which for ome feels akin to having proximity to a king.
Totally fine. Nothing to worry about.
Elon Musk already holds the world record for losing the most money, and the Tesla CEO has lost another $30.5 billion in the first month of 2024. At the same time, his rival in wealth, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, has gained $7.3 billion.
Now the gap between the tech moguls is just $15 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. That might sound like a lot (a lot, a lot) to normal people, but it’s not much in the race to the top for the world’s richest, especially considering that Musk has already lost twice that sum in just a few weeks.
You’d think that Musk would be attending to business in light of that. Well, not so much. Get a load of what he spent the weekend doing around the clock:
It was a full blown bender, I’m afraid.
The man has issues. Big ones.