Capital Economy, Business and Finance
On Saturday the WSJ reported that Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, had used LSD, cocaine, ecstasy, ketamine and psychedelic mushrooms and that his drug use was “ongoing”. Yesterday Musk said the journal’s pages were “not fit to line a parrot cage” and that no drugs had been found in three years of random testing ordered by Nasa – but he didn’t reject the allegations outright and the paper stood by its reporting. The result is that the drug use claims now have an unproven open secret status that may concern shareholders as well as Nasa. Musk oversees six companies including Tesla, whose share price has risen nearly six times faster than the S&P 500 in the past five years, and SpaceX, which has US government contracts worth $14 billion, most of them with Nasa. The space agency has a strict no-drugs policy for contractors as well as staff. If his drug use were acknowledged it would also violate his own companies’ codes of conduct. Instead he posted on X yesterday: “Whatever I’m doing I should obviously keep doing it”.