President Donald Trump wants to know whether his nuclear blowup with Elon Musk might be related to the SpaceX founder’s alleged drug use.
According to CNN, Trump has questioned some of his aides and advisers about the former administration fixture’s reported drug habit, which was detailed in an explosive New York Times story last Friday.
Publicly, however, Trump has declined to wade into the issue—at least officially.
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“I don’t want to comment on his drug use,” the president told reporters aboard Air Force One on Friday night. “I don’t know what his status is.”
Trump also claimed that he hasn’t even been thinking about Musk.
“Honestly, I’ve been so busy working on China, working on Russia, working on Iran, working on so many things—I’m not thinking about Elon,” he said, adding that he didn’t have any plans to speak with Musk, either.
Musk had already admitted to using ketamine, but the Times claimed his usage during the 2024 presidential campaign was more intense than previously known. His ketamine habit had been harming his bladder, the report said, and Musk would frequently use ecstasy, Adderall, and mushrooms as well.
It’s unclear if this continued once he became the de facto head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency in January. In that role, Musk at times appeared to act erratically, like when he gave a salute that many said was a Sieg Heil.
On CNN Friday night, tech journalist Kara Swisher said that the Trump camp is floating the drug topic to “warm” Musk to put a stop to his Trump-bashing.
“You better keep it quiet or else we have things we could do,” she imagined them saying.
“But the problem is this is a guy who doesn‘t care obviously that much,” she said of the world’s richest person, who initially lashed out at the GOP tax bill, but then escalated things dramatically by essentially calling Trump a pedophile.
“Now, he certainly has a lot of government contracts and other things that he has to pay attention to, especially shareholders,” Swisher added. “But he is not someone that is easily scared, I think. We‘ll see. I mean, he may think it‘s smart to stop fighting with Donald Trump. It probably is a good idea for Donald Trump to stop fighting with Elon Musk, too, because no one‘s going to win in this particular fight."
