The Chaotic Personal Life of Elon Musk

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From “New York Times,” I’m Michael Barbaro. This is “The Daily.”

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A “Times” investigation has found that as Elon Musk became one of President Trump’s closest and most influential advisors, he was juggling an increasingly chaotic personal life and a drug habit far more serious than previously known. Today, my colleagues, Kirsten Grind and Megan Twohey, on why those closest to Musk are finally sounding the alarm.

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It’s Monday, June 2.

Kirsten and Megan, thank you for being here on a Sunday morning. We really appreciate it.

Thanks for having us.

Happy to be here.

So will one of you describe what happened in the Oval Office on Friday afternoon.

Well, it was a remarkable scene. After these many months of working with President Trump and leading DOGE to cut federal spending, Elon Musk had recently announced that he was leaving the administration.

And so on Friday, it’s like this big moment, right? They do this, press conference that is meant to be a celebratory sendoff.

— and the whole time, Trump is very admiring and complimentary of Musk. And Musk is standing next to Trump wearing a shirt that says “dogefather.” And Trump gives him a golden key, thanking him for his service.

But when it came time for reporters to ask questions —

— the very first question that was asked of Musk was about this months-long investigation that Kirsten and I have done into his personal life.

It didn’t go well.

He starts talking about how “The New York Times” doesn’t have any credibility. And then he abruptly says, move on, and just refuses to answer the question.

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So tell us about that reporting. Your reporting that Elon Musk quite evidently does not want to talk about in the Oval Office.

So what we found was that, as Musk was rising to political power last year, his drug use was far more intense than previously known. And that other aspects of his life were also increasingly chaotic and messy. He’s had this fixation on fathering children while he’s had these overlapping romantic relationships and some legal battles over his growing brood of at least 14 children. And so what we found was that there were some people who have been close to him who were increasingly worried about this broader trend in increasingly erratic behavior.

And Kirsten, what exactly are people worried about?

So there’s a couple things going on here. So the first concern is really just that he hadn’t achieved this immense amount of power and what these sort of private issues meant to his role right next to Donald Trump and at the head of DOGE and the government. But then there’s also these private concerns, which is for his health, for his well-being. And those were concerns we kept hearing again and again over many months.

It sounds like basically people around Elon Musk are worried that he might spin out of control. And the implications, given what he’s doing for the United States government, are that that work might spin out of control.

Yeah. And listen, Musk has long been known for grandiose statements and a mercurial personality, and that’s actually one of the things that supporters have liked about him. Like they see him as this eccentric genius whose slash and burn management style is like a really key part of his success. But what we found in our reporting is that some of his behaviors in the eyes of some of the people who have known him has become much more severe and problematic.

Kirsten, specifically when it comes to the drugs, what do you both find?

So what we found is that Musk’s actual drug use contradicts the few things that he’s said about it publicly over the years.

Remember back in 2018 —

— he was on the Joe Rogan show, and he smoked pot.

Right. Famously.

Yes.

And then he kind of says afterwards that he didn’t really like it. And then last year —

— in an interview with Don Lemon —

— he speaks about his ketamine use.

So ketamine is this very powerful anesthetic. And it’s typically used in medical procedures. That’s its normal use. But it has been used at this point in what’s known as off label to treat depression in some cases. So he tells Don Lemon, listen, I do take ketamine very occasionally. He says a small amount every couple of weeks.

Now, separately, I’ve reported in the past that he is also a recreational drug user, and that he’s taken ketamine recreationally, as well as psychedelics like magic mushrooms. He’s taken cocaine. He’s not addressed that. And in fact, a biography came out about him. And in that, he is quoted as saying, I don’t really like illegal drugs.

Got it. So that’s the backdrop for the reporting you all do that finds something quite different?

Right. What we found was that, contrary to his claims, that he is simply an occasional drug user that he is, in fact, a much more intense consumer of drugs. And for one, we found that by the time he gave that interview to Don Lemon in March of last year, he had a much more serious ketamine habit. He was using it much more frequently, in fact, sometimes on a daily basis, according to people who were familiar with his drug use. And when he was on the campaign trail last year, he was telling people that he was using so much ketamine that it was causing bladder problems, which is —

What does that tell you?

It’s an effect of chronic use of the drug. And we also found that in addition to this, like much more intense ketamine use, he was continuing to use ecstasy and other psychedelics, and that he also traveled with a daily pill box that contained as many as 20 pills, including ones that had the markings of the stimulant Adderall.

And so, in the course of our reporting, there were people we spoke to who had knowledge of his drug use, who also had concern about this drug use, not just for the volume of it, which was so much more extensive than previously known, but for the mixing of these drugs.

Right. Well, taken together, Kirsten, what did the use of all of these drugs, especially that very heavy use of ketamine that you two found, what did that start to tell you and these worried friends of Elon Musk?

The worry really starts to become at this point, how is he going to be able to function in all these various roles, not just with the government, but he is overseeing six companies. One of them is putting rockets in space.

Yeah. And I think it’s important to note that Musk has talked openly about his — to some extent in interviews and in social media posts — about his mental health struggles. He’s talked about having extreme highs and extreme lows and very serious stress and a raging storm in his mind. And he has also openly opposed traditional therapy and antidepressants. And so this drug use comes into that picture of this person who clearly has some mental health struggles and is also opposed to more traditional treatment.

And the thing with ketamine is that while there have been some doctors who have embraced it for treatment of depression, the FDA has been very explicit about the risks of this drug, especially if you start to use it in large amounts. First of all, it’s this powerful anesthetic, and it can have this disassociating effect, where you kind of feel like separate from your body. It can cause hallucinations. And you run the risk of addiction.

A word that stands out is the idea that ketamine in particular is disassociative, that a person becomes kind of alien, to some degree, to themselves. And that seems really important when it comes to someone who, from the campaign to the period after the election to pretty much now, is advising President-elect and then President Donald Trump to do some very consequential things, including obliterate entire federal agencies, cut tens of thousands of federal workers, and change the direction of the United States government.

And now, the reporting you have done has raised the prospect that some of those decisions might have been made at a time when Elon Musk was using some very powerful, disassociative drug.

Right. So the time period we were really focused on was last year, as he was rising to power alongside Donald Trump and becoming one of his closest advisors. We can’t, unfortunately, say what happened after inauguration, but we have asked the White House and of course, Elon Musk, whether or not they’ve drug tested him so we could know what his use was during that time period.

You’re saying we don’t know if he’s ever been drug tested by the federal government?

Yeah. I mean, one of the remarkable things here is that even as there have been some public indications of his drug use in recent years, it is unclear whether or not there’s been any substantial monitoring or scrutiny of his drug use, especially as he came into the White House and was handed the ability to just start slashing the federal government.

We asked the White House if they had done any drug testing of Musk, which can sometimes and is often a requirement for people as they come into top positions in the government. They’ve refused to answer those questions. And SpaceX, his aerospace company, receives huge federal contracts. And as part of that is required to maintain a drug-free workplace and test all of its employees.

But what we found was that Musk receives advance warning of those tests. And we’ve reached out to SpaceX, and they’ve refused to respond to our questions about those warnings. So it’s impossible to know to what extent he was doing drugs once he was in the White House.

And if you’ve been paying attention to Musk, you may have noticed some more erratic behavior in public, which is also something we spoke to people about during the course of this investigation.

So earlier this year, around the time Trump was inaugurated, Elon Musk got on stage and made what he called later a positive gesture but which many people took to be a Nazi-style salute. That was one incident that friends brought to us as an increase of his kind of bad behavior.

And then there was another appearance earlier this year at the Conservative Political Action committee. And in this appearance, he comes on stage, he’s wearing sunglasses, he’s carrying this giant chainsaw, and he proceeds to give this interview that is very odd and punctuated by random bursts of laughter and some garbled speaking. And after that, it was pretty widely speculated that he was under the influence or on drugs during that performance.

Megan, Elon Musk did not respond to that question in the Oval Office, but I’m curious what he has said specifically about the reporting that you and Kirsten have done about this drug use, this ketamine use.

Since the press conference on Friday, Musk has made some posts on X trying to dismiss our investigation. In one post, he said, “To be clear, I am not taking drugs. “The New York Times” was lying their ass off.” But we have done extensive reporting as part of this investigation. And we interviewed more than a dozen people who have worked with or otherwise known Musk. We reviewed legal documents. We reviewed private text messages, and we also reviewed photographic evidence. And “The Times” very much stands behind it.

What we found beyond the drug use was that some of those people close to him had started to see other behavior that was becoming more and more erratic. That there was a larger picture of concerning behavior that was taking place.

Right. And we will talk about that after the break.

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We’ll be right back.

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So Kirsten and Megan, tell us more about this other behavior that, like the drug use found in your reporting, starts to worry people around Musk. You had mentioned that it involves overlapping romantic relationships.

Yeah, that’s right, Michael. What we found is that in addition to this drug use that was much more extensive than previously known, that there were other aspects of his private life that were also increasingly messy. He has been public about his support of what he sees as this need to have more children, to help deal with the declining birth rates. And that he himself wants to have a lot of children to that end. But we found that behind the scenes, this fixation on fathering more and more children has also been extremely messy and chaotic.

How so, Kirsten?

It’s really the secrecy aspect of this. So he has had multiple partners over the years, who he has had different children with. And often, he is not telling these women that he has fathered children or offered his sperm with other women.

Let’s get specific here. What does this look like?

So it’s useful to zoom in on his relationship with Claire Boucher, the singer known as Grimes, with whom he shares three children. And she enters a relationship with him in 2018. By that point, he has had six children from his previous marriage. And she told people close to her that she believed they were in a monogamous relationship and building a family together.

But in 2022, when a surrogate was pregnant with their third child, Ms. Boucher discovered that Musk had recently fathered twins with Shivon Zilis, an executive at his brain implant company, Neuralink. And she was shocked and furious. And Ms. Boucher and Musk reconciled and moved beyond that, only for Ms. Boucher to learn in August of 2023 that Zilis was pregnant with a third child, and that they were also expecting a fourth child via surrogacy.

So basically, he’s having an entirely separate family and being very secretive about it?

Yes. And then by mid 2023, Elon Musk had started yet another secret relationship, this one with a right-leaning writer, Ashley St. Clair, in New York. When I talked to Ashley, she spoke about how Elon Musk had said he’d be willing to give his sperm to anyone who wanted a child.

Wow.

But when she was in the delivery room last September, again, unbeknownst to these other women, Elon Musk told her over disappearing signal messages that he wanted her to keep the paternity of the child and their relationship quiet.

I just want to make sure I’m understanding this seen. As Ashley St. Clair is in the delivery room, about to give birth to one of Elon Musk’s children, she gets a message from him saying, don’t tell anyone I’m the dad?

Yes. And meanwhile, while he is also undergoing a really messy custody battle with Ms. Boucher over their children. And they had eventually struck an agreement in which they both agreed that they would work to keep their three children out of the public spotlight. But Musk is very attached to their eldest child, who goes by X. And now, he’s bringing X with him everywhere. I mean, he brings him on the campaign trail. He brings him into the Oval Office, to an Ultimate Fighting match.

And what we found was that behind the scenes, Ms. Boucher was very concerned and was complaining to Musk that all of these public appearances were happening in violation of the custody agreement that they had struck. And she worried that all of the travel and lack of sleep were harming the boy’s health.

It’s hard to imagine this level of drama not affecting someone’s ability to do their job. I mean, if any of us have been through a really hard stretch in our personal lives, we know that it can make functioning in our day jobs more challenging.

Right. And to some extent, Elon Musk has always really thrived on drama and provoking people. But what we found over these months is that this has really spilled into something much greater than we’ve ever seen before.

And perhaps, all of this together is what those around Musk who are worried about him are worried about, the totality of this and his ability to function in an environment in which drug use is colliding with these custody challenges.

Right. And it’s really this combination of all of these behaviors together that has made some of the people who have been close with him increasingly concerned. I mean, we talked to some people who basically said that Musk had become unrecognizable to them.

I just want to end by understanding exactly where we are in the Elon Musk story and saga, to a degree. As Megan you explained earlier, the Friday news conference at the White House was, in theory, a kind of goodbye to Musk as this advisor to Trump and head of the Department of Government Efficiency. But during that news conference, Trump went out of his way to say, Musk isn’t really leaving.

So the man you’re describing, beset by all these dramas, traumas, and troubles, is still pretty central to the functioning of this presidency, as well as all these businesses that do work with the government and affect all of our lives. And I know you can’t say for sure what the drug use situation is at this moment, but it sounds like all this personal drama and erratic behavior is still very present. So where does that leave him and where does that leave us?

I guess I would just say, someone like Elon Musk is just surrounded by people who are telling him yes all the time. And they’re very reluctant to tell him no. So when we see something like what is happening here, when both in private and publicly, people are starting to say no, that suggests there’s a problem.

Yeah, that’s right. And no matter what his sort of technical position is in relationship to Trump moving forward. I mean, he still has a tremendous amount of power and will continue to, I mean, from his role in politics to these massive companies and billions of dollars in federal contracts. And I think that whether you’re a Musk supporter or a Musk critic, everybody should have real concern about his health and how steady he is or not as he operates all these levers of power.

Well, Kirsten and Megan, thank you very much.

Thank you.

Thank you for having us.

We’ll be right back.

Here’s what else you need to know today. On Sunday, Ukraine carried out one of its most audacious attacks inside Russia to date, using drones to destroy more than 40 Russian warplanes across four different military bases.

Ukrainian officials said they smuggled the drones into Russia inside of trucks whose rooftops were remotely opened, allowing the drones to take off and attack the Russian planes without triggering radar. For its part, Russia carried out attacks of its own that killed 12 Ukrainian soldiers, the latest evidence that the war there is intensifying despite US calls for peace talks.

And Iran has significantly ramped up its enrichment of uranium since President Trump took office, heightening pressure on the US to quickly reach a nuclear deal with Iran’s leaders. A confidential UN report has found that since February, Iran has produced 300 pounds of uranium enriched to 60 percent just below bomb grade and could quickly create the fuel for about 10 nuclear weapons. That’s up from around five weapons since Trump was inaugurated.

Over the weekend, the US presented Iran with its first formal proposal for a nuclear deal, which calls on Iran to end all future uranium enrichment, a demand that Iran is not expected to accept.

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Today’s episode was produced by Clare Toeniskoetter, Diana Nguyen, Rachele Bonja, and Mary Wilson. It was edited by Patricia Willens and Michael Benoist. Contains original music by Elisheba Ittoop and Dan Powell, and was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly.

That’s it for “The Daily.” I’m Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.