Drug Addicted South African Nazi Billionaire, Elon Musk— Alas, Neither Gone, Nor Forgotten

Today’s New Word: “Cattywampus”

Musk finished what he wanted to— and paid to— accomplish  in DC. With a mix of self-serving chaos and ineffective policy— featuring significant collateral damage to government functionality and public welfare— he decapitated and disabled all the agencies investigating his companies’ criminal behavior;  he secured billions of dollars in contracts for those same companies; and he accessed the information he wanted on every American. Mission accomplished; time to move on. And does anyone really think the pending lawsuits against him will amount to anything— especially with the pardoner-in-chief standing by… just in case? The way CNN reported it wasn’t exactly flattering: “Rather than set government straight, Elon Musk is leaving Washington with the federal budget all cattywampus. Deficit spending is increasing, not waning, and there is a growing school of thought that his ‘efficiency’ effort could end up costing the government as much as or more than it saved.”

Politically, he may have been a net-negative to the GOP as well. He certainly was in the Wisconsin Supreme Court race and Democrats have been effective in using him as a boogey man in special elections. His popularity has tanked and the reputational damage he’s caused his companies worldwide is both unprecedented and disastrous. It remains to be seen if Tesla’s brand will ever come back. The launch of their much-ballyhooed robotaxis next month will probably help give us a clearer picture of how deep the damage goes.

Before dawn today, Kirsten Grind and Megan Twohey reported that during the 2024 presidential campaign— which he invested over $300 million in— he was high on powerful, mind-altering drugs most of the time. “Musk’s drug consumption,’ they wrote, “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.” Once Trump won and established the new Musk-centric regime, Musk, like a feudal lord, started exhibiting “erratic behavior, insulting cabinet members, gesturing like a Nazi and garbling his answers in a staged interview… 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… If you’ve used too much ketamine, you can’t really get work done, and I have a lot of work.’ [But] 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.”

Musk has also been juggling the messy consequences of his efforts to produce more babies.

By 2022, 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 [Grimes— Claire] 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, Boucher was furious to discover that Musk had recently fathered twins with Shivon Zilis, an executive at his brain implant company, Neuralink, according to people familiar with the situation.

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…

The NY Times assigned a quintet of big name reporters to cover the Musk DC departure story on Wednesday, dramatizing the whole thing in a lede that had Trump and Musk falling out: “Musk took a swipe at President Trump’s signature domestic policy legislation, saying it would add to the national deficit. He complained to administration officials about a lucrative deal that went to a rival company to build an artificial-intelligence data center in the Middle East. And he has yet to make good on a $100 million pledge to Trump’s political operation. Musk, who once called himself the president’s ‘first buddy,’ is now operating with some distance from Trump as he says he is ending his government work to spend more time on his companies… [H]e has also made it clear that he is disillusioned with Washington and frustrated with the obstacles he encountered as he upended the federal bureaucracy, raising questions about the strength of the alliance between the president and the world’s richest man.”

NBC News compared Musk’s sojourn in the Trump regime to Andrew Mellon’s catastrophic stint as Treasury Secretary for 3 of America’s worst presidents (Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover) during the roaring twenties and his key role in sparking the Great Depression. Scott Bland described Mellon as “one of the richest men of his time, a powerful force in business and then in government— so influential that political adversaries taunted the White House that he was ‘the real president.’”

Mellon pulled the whistle, 

Hoover rang the bell,

Wall Street gave the signal, 

And the country went to hell.

“When Democrats took back Congress in the backlash after the Depression began,” wrote Bland, “they investigated the intersection of Mellon businesses and government contracts they won while he was in the Cabinet, initiating impeachment proceedings before he resigned to take an ambassadorship. And ultimately, Mellon saw his low-spending, laissez-faire ethos pushed aside in national politics by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal, which ushered in a wave of government spending and social programs that were anathema to Mellon-era Republicans.”

Jake Lahut reported that many Republicans are already looking to distance themselves from Musk’s team entirely. “A Republican donor organizer and campaign adviser tells Wired that they’re unconvinced Musk won’t come back. (‘Nothing is cast in stone with Trump and his people,’ they say.) Nonetheless, they say, they’re telling clients running for office— both new candidates and incumbents— to use Musk’s exit as a chance to distance themselves from the DOGE chainsaw. ‘I think people need to distance themselves from it,’ they say.”

Lahut also noted that “While Musk’s supposed departure has been making headlines, to those attuned to DOGE’s actual workings, the most seismic move came on Thursday, when news broke that top Musk lieutenant Steve Davis would also be leaving DOGE. Davis has worked with Musk for years, including at Twitter and as the president of the Boring Company. He has been vital to day-to-day DOGE operations, and Sahil Lavingia, a recently fired DOGE staffer, told Wired that Davis led the group. ‘Steven was the only person who was across everything,’ Lavingia says.”