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White House refuses to come clean on Musk drug testing (www.thedailybeast.com)

submitted 2 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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The Trump White House is typically game to spin any narrative lobbed its way, but reports about Elon Musk’s rampant drug use appear to be another story.

Following The New York Times’ shocking report that Musk, while acting as a senior adviser to Donald Trump, was regularly consuming large amounts of drugs, reporter Megan Twohey appeared on MSNBC to discuss the story. In the process, she revealed that the White House had refused to answer questions put to them about whether or not they had administered drug tests to Musk during his tenure.

Musk’s SpaceX similarly did not respond to questions from the Times, specifically about whether the company gave Musk advance notice of the “random” drug tests it administers to its employees, something it reportedly began doing after he infamously smoked weed during his appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast. SpaceX, as a large government contractor, is required to maintain a drug-free workforce.

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[-] [email protected] 5 points 2 days ago

I think the cognitive reset that psychedelics can awaken come in basically two varieties: delusions of grandeur or empathy. Elon Musk has benefitted from privilege, luck, and the immunity to consequences that comes from being a figurehead leader for people who expect him to make the right noises to support their cause. This lucky run has fueled his fantasy of making humans an interplanetary species like in his Iain M. Banks science fiction novels that he uses to name his SpaceX vehicles.

In Elon Musk's case, engineers at Tesla and SpaceX have shared his technocratic vision up until he tried to adopt Trump's Maga base away from Trump (e.g. with his fascist Nazi salute). Engineers of solar panels, self-driving cars, and space vehicles have to have a minimum level of empathy to deal with the stresses of working in teams to overcome difficult problems; most probably genuinely want to help humanity by expanding capitalism to asteroid mining and Mars colonies; the Maga mob, though, have much more grounded ambitions of restoring their socioeconomic dominance over cultures not their own. Attempting to curry favor with both at the same time only works if your leadership inspiring improvements in solar panel, self-driving car, and space technology dominate news stories with success after success, building and maintaining momentum beyond what Trump can disrupt with his own media stunts like the tariff posturing. But Trump has succeeded in making the Maga faction feel victimized and dominated the news cycle so far in 2025.

Elon and Trump are both salesmen, but the latter only has to break things to get attention. So, I am not surprised that Elon finds solace in mind-altering drugs to comfort himself from the realization that his support base simply is smaller than Trump's.

this post was submitted on 31 May 2025

370 points (98.7% liked)

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