On the
Campaign Trail, Elon Musk Juggled Drugs and Family Drama
As Mr. Musk
entered President Trump’s orbit, his private life grew increasingly tumultuous
and his drug use was more intense than previously known.
Kirsten
Grind Megan Twohey
By Kirsten
Grind and Megan Twohey
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/30/us/elon-musk-drugs-children-trump.html
May 30, 2025
Updated 3:17
p.m. ET
As Elon Musk
became one of Donald J. Trump’s closest allies last year, leading raucous
rallies and donating about $275 million to help him win the presidency, he was
also using drugs far more intensely than previously known, according to people
familiar with his activities.
Mr. Musk’s
drug consumption went well beyond occasional use. He told people he was taking
so much ketamine, a powerful anesthetic, that it was affecting his bladder, a
known effect of chronic use. He took Ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms. And he
traveled with a daily medication box that held about 20 pills, including ones
with the markings of the stimulant Adderall, according to a photo of the box
and people who have seen it.
It is
unclear whether Mr. Musk, 53, was taking drugs when he became a fixture at the
White House this year and was handed the power to slash the federal
bureaucracy. But he has exhibited erratic behavior, insulting cabinet members,
gesturing like a Nazi and garbling his answers in a staged interview.
At the same
time, Mr. Musk’s family life has grown increasingly tumultuous as he has
negotiated overlapping romantic relationships and private legal battles
involving his growing brood of children, according to documents and interviews.
On Wednesday
evening, Mr. Musk announced that he was ending his stint with the government,
after lamenting how much time he had spent on politics instead of his
businesses.
Mr. Musk and
his lawyer did not respond to requests for comment this week about his drug use
and personal life. He has previously said he was prescribed ketamine for
depression, taking it about every two weeks. And he told his biographer, “I
really don’t like doing illegal drugs.”
The White
House declined to comment on Mr. Musk’s drug use. At a news conference with Mr.
Trump on Friday afternoon, Mr. Musk was asked about The New York Times’s
coverage. He questioned the newspaper’s credibility and told the reporter to
“move on.”
As a large
government contractor, Mr. Musk’s aerospace firm, SpaceX, must maintain a
drug-free work force and administers random drug tests to its employees. But
Mr. Musk has received advance warning of the tests, according to people close
to the process. SpaceX did not respond to questions about those warnings.
Mr. Musk,
who joined the president’s inner circle after making a vast fortune on cars,
satellites and rocket ships, has long been known for grandiose statements and a
mercurial personality. Supporters see him as an eccentric genius whose
slash-and-burn management style is key to his success.
But last
year, as he jumped into the political arena, some people who knew him worried
about his frequent drug use, mood swings and fixation on having more children.
This account of his behavior is based on private messages obtained by The Times
as well as interviews with more than a dozen people who have known or worked
with him.
This year,
some of his longtime friends have renounced him, pointing to some of his public
conduct.
“Elon has
pushed the boundaries of his bad behavior more and more,” said Philip Low, a
neuroscientist and onetime friend of Mr. Musk’s who criticized him for his
Nazi-like gesture at a rally.
And some
women are challenging Mr. Musk for control of their children.
One of his
former partners, Claire Boucher, the musician known as Grimes, has been
fighting with Mr. Musk over their 5-year-old son, known as X. Mr. Musk is
extremely attached to the boy, taking him to the Oval Office and high-profile
gatherings that are broadcast around the world.
Ms. Boucher
has privately complained that the appearances violate a custody settlement in
which she and Mr. Musk agreed to try to keep their children out of the public
eye, according to people familiar with her concerns and the provision, which
has not been previously reported. She has told people that she worries about
the boy’s safety, and that frequent travel and sleep deprivation are harming
his health.
Another
mother, the right-leaning writer Ashley St. Clair, revealed in February that
she had a secret relationship with Mr. Musk and had given birth to his 14th
known child. Mr. Musk offered her a large settlement to keep his paternity
concealed, but she refused. He sought a gag order in New York to force Ms. St.
Clair to stop speaking publicly, she said in an interview.
A Ketamine
Habit
Mr. Musk has
described some of his mental health issues in interviews and on social media,
saying in one post that he has felt “great highs, terrible lows and unrelenting
stress.” He has denounced traditional therapy and antidepressants.
He plays
video games for hours on end. He struggles with binge eating, according to
people familiar with his habits, and takes weight-loss medication. And he posts
day and night on his social media platform, X.
Mr. Musk has
a history of recreational drug use, The Wall Street Journal reported last year.
Some board members at Tesla, his electric vehicle company, have worried about
his use of drugs, including Ambien, a sleep medication.
In an
interview in March 2024, the journalist Don Lemon pressed him on his drug use.
Mr. Musk said he took only “a small amount” of ketamine, about once every two
weeks, as a prescribed treatment for negative moods.
“If you’ve
used too much ketamine, you can’t really get work done, and I have a lot of
work,” he said.
He had
actually developed a far more serious habit, The Times found.
Mr. Musk had
been using ketamine often, sometimes daily, and mixing it with other drugs,
according to people familiar with his consumption. The line between medical use
and recreation was blurry, troubling some people close to him.
He also took
Ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms at private gatherings across the United
States and in at least one other country, according to those who attended the
events.
The Food and
Drug Administration has formally approved the use of ketamine only as an
anesthetic in medical procedures. Doctors with a special license may prescribe
it for psychiatric disorders like depression. But the agency has warned about
its risks, which came into sharp relief after the death of the actor Matthew
Perry. The drug has psychedelic properties and can cause dissociation from
reality. Chronic use can lead to addiction and problems with bladder pain and
control.
By the
spring of last year, Mr. Musk was ramping up criticism of President Joseph R.
Biden Jr., particularly his policies on illegal immigration and diversity
initiatives.
Mr. Musk was
also facing federal investigations into his businesses. Regulators were looking
into crashes of Tesla’s self-driving cars and allegations of racism at its
factories, among other complaints.
“There are
at least half a dozen initiatives of significance to take me down,” he wrote in
a text message to someone close to him last May. “The Biden administration
views me as the #2 threat after Trump.”
“I can’t be
president, but I can help Trump defeat Biden and I will,” he added.
He publicly
endorsed Mr. Trump in July.
Around that
time, Mr. Musk told people that his ketamine use was causing bladder issues,
according to people familiar with the conversations.
On Oct. 5,
he appeared with Mr. Trump at a rally for the first time, bouncing up and down
around the candidate. That evening, Mr. Musk shared his excitement with a
person close to him. “I’m feeling more optimistic after tonight,” he wrote in a
text message. “Tomorrow we unleash the anomaly in the matrix.”
“This is not
something on the chessboard, so they will be quite surprised,” Mr. Musk added
about an hour later. “‘Lasers’ from space.”
After Mr.
Trump won, Mr. Musk rented a cottage at Mar-a-Lago, the president-elect’s
Florida resort, to assist with the transition. Mr. Musk attended personnel
meetings and sat in on phone calls with foreign leaders. And he crafted plans
to overhaul the federal government under the new Department of Government
Efficiency.
Family
Secrets
Mr. Musk has
also been juggling the messy consequences of his efforts to produce more
babies.
By 2022, Mr.
Musk, who has married and divorced three times, had fathered six children in
his first marriage (including one who died in infancy), as well as two with Ms.
Boucher. She told people she believed they were in a monogamous relationship
and building a family together.
But while a
surrogate was pregnant with their third child, Ms. Boucher was furious to
discover that Mr. Musk had recently fathered twins with Shivon Zilis, an
executive at his brain implant company, Neuralink, according to people familiar
with the situation.
Mr. Musk was
by then sounding an alarm that the world’s declining birthrates would lead to
the end of civilization, publicly encouraging people to have children and
donating $10 million to a research initiative on population growth.
Privately,
he was spending time with Simone and Malcolm Collins, prominent figures in the
emerging pronatalist movement, and urging his wealthy friends to have as many
children as possible. He believed the world needed more intelligent people,
according to people aware of the conversations.
Mr. Collins
declined to comment on his relationship with Mr. Musk, but said, “Elon is one
of the people taking this cause seriously.”
Even as Mr.
Musk fathered more children, he favored his son X. By the fall of 2022, during
a period when he and Ms. Boucher were broken up, he began traveling with the
boy for days at a time, often without providing advance notice, according to
people familiar with his actions.
Ms. Boucher
reconciled with Mr. Musk, only to get another unpleasant surprise. In August
2023, she learned that Ms. Zilis was expecting a third child with Mr. Musk via
surrogacy and was pregnant with their fourth.
Ms. Boucher
and Mr. Musk began a contentious custody battle, during which Mr. Musk kept X
for months. They eventually signed the joint custody agreement that specified
keeping their children out of the spotlight.
By mid-2023,
unknown to either Ms. Boucher or Ms. Zilis, Mr. Musk had started a romantic
relationship with Ms. St. Clair, the writer, who lives in New York City.
Ms. St.
Clair said in an interview that at first, Mr. Musk told her he wasn’t dating
anyone else. But when she was about six months pregnant, he acknowledged that
he was romantically involved with Ms. Zilis, who went on to become a more
visible fixture in Mr. Musk’s life.
Ms. St.
Clair said that Mr. Musk told her he had fathered children around the world,
including one with a Japanese pop star. He said he would be willing to give his
sperm to anyone who wanted to have a child.
“He made it
seem like it was just his altruism and he generally believed these people
should just have children,” Ms. St. Clair said.
Ms. St.
Clair said that when she was in a delivery room giving birth in September, Mr.
Musk told her over disappearing Signal messages that he wanted to keep his
paternity and their relationship quiet.
On election
night, Ms. St. Clair and Mr. Musk both went to Mar-a-Lago to celebrate Mr.
Trump’s victory. But she had to pretend that she hardly knew him, she said.
He offered
her $15 million and $100,000 a month until their son turned 21, in exchange for
her silence, according to documents reviewed by The Times and first reported by
The Journal. But she did not want her son’s paternity to be hidden.
After she
went public in February, ahead of a tabloid story, she sued Mr. Musk to
acknowledge paternity and, later, to get emergency child support.
Mr. Musk
sought a gag order, claiming that any publicity involving the child, or
comments by Ms. St. Clair on her experience, would be a security risk for the
boy.
‘No Sympathy
for This Behavior’
Some of Mr.
Musk’s onetime friends have aired concerns about what they considered toxic
public behavior.
In a January
newsletter explaining why their friendship had ended, Sam Harris, a public
intellectual, wrote that Mr. Musk had used his social media platform to defame
people and promote lies.
“There is
something seriously wrong with his moral compass, if not his perception of
reality,” Dr. Harris wrote.
Later that
month, at a Trump inauguration event, Mr. Musk thumped his chest and thrust his
hand diagonally upward, resembling a fascist salute. “My heart goes out to
you,” he told the crowd. “It is thanks to you that the future of civilization
is assured.”
Mr. Musk
dismissed the resulting public outcry, saying he had made a “positive gesture.”
Dr. Low, who
is chief executive of NeuroVigil, a neurotechnology company, was outraged by
the performance. He wrote Mr. Musk a sharp email, shared with The Times,
cursing him “for giving the Nazi salute.”
When Mr.
Musk didn’t respond to the message, Dr. Low posted his concerns on social
media. “I have no sympathy for this behavior,” he wrote on Facebook, referring
to the gesture as well as other behaviors. “At some point, after having
repeatedly confronted it in private, I believe the ethical thing to do is to
speak out, forcefully and unapologetically.”
The next
month, Mr. Musk once again found himself under scrutiny, this time for an
appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference outside Washington.
As he walked
onto the stage, he was handed a chain saw from one of his political allies,
Javier Milei, the president of Argentina. “This is the chain saw for
bureaucracy!” Mr. Musk shouted to the cheering crowd.
Some
conference organizers told The Times that they did not notice anything out of
the ordinary about his behavior behind the scenes. But during an onstage
interview, he spoke in disjointed bouts of stuttering and laughing, with
sunglasses on. Clips of it went viral as many viewers speculated about possible
drug use.
Julie Tate
contributed research.
Kirsten
Grind is an investigative business reporter for The Times, writing stories
about companies, chief executives and billionaires across Silicon Valley and
the technology industry.
Megan Twohey
is an investigative reporter at The Times. Her work has prompted changes to the
law, criminal convictions and cultural shifts.
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