Elon Musk hit back at the Wall Street Journal on Sunday after a bombshell report by the paper accused the billionaire of using illegal drugs and said executives at his companies were worried by his alleged fondness for cocaine, ecstasy, shrooms, ketamine, and LSD.
In a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, Musk sneered that the Journal was “not fit to line a parrot cage for bird [poo emoji],” and asserted, “after that one puff with [Joe] Rogan, I agreed, at NASA’s request, to do 3 years of random drug testing. Not even trace quantities were found of any drugs or alcohol.”
Musk’s post referenced an incident in 2018 in which he smoked marijuana on Rogan’s podcast, which led the Pentagon to review his federal security clearance, which was tied to his company SpaceX’s work with the U.S. AirForce.
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Musk’s denial that he’s regularly getting blasted raises the prospect that his troll-like behavior as the new owner of X/Twitter is just his true personality and not the result of mind-bending substances.
In the Journal’s Saturday report, the paper claimed that a former director at Tesla was so disgruntled with Musk’s alleged drug consumption and erratic behavior that she refused to seek reelection to the board. People with knowledge of the situation said that Linda Johnson Rice, who left Tesla in 2019, asked the board to look into the billionaire’s supposed use of LSD, cocaine, ecstasy, and psychedelic mushrooms, but was ignored.
The Journal noted that illegal drug use would most likely break federal policies that could put SpaceX’s billions of dollars in government contracts in question along with tens of thousands of jobs.
The newspaper said that the first major incident occurred at a SpaceX event in late 2017 when Musk arrived nearly an hour late to an all-hands meeting, slurred his words and blathered for 15 minutes in front of hundreds of employees and executives, and called the company’s Big Falcon Rocket (BFR) prototype the “Big F—ing Rocket.”
At Tesla, current directors have asked Musk’s brother, Kimbal, for help over his conduct, but the outlet said they have been cautious not to explicitly use the word “drugs” in their requests.
Musk did not respond to The Wall Street Journal’s request for comment, but his attorney, Alex Spiro, insisted he was “regularly and randomly drug tested at SpaceX and has never failed a test.”
Read it at The Wall Street Journal
