Ever Wonder Why Musk Exhibits Delusional Thinking And A Sense Of Preternatural Self-Importance?

Remember Special K? Musk Is An Addict

Within moments of beginning his statement on the Trump regime, French Senator Claude Malhuret got to Musk— and to Musk’s ketamine problem: "Washington has become the court of Nero, an incendiary emperor, submissive courtiers and a buffoon on ketamine tasked with purging the civil service. This is a tragedy for the free world but above all it is a tragedy for the United States."

In her essay on the drug, Shayla Love wrote that excessive use of the drug can make anyone feel like they rule the world, anyone in this case referring to Musk, who, at his appearance at the CPAC Conference hoisted a chain saw in the air, stumbled over some of his words and questioned whether there was really gold stored in Fort Knox, inspired people on Twitter, to start posting about ketamine. “Musk has said he uses ketamine regularly, so for the past couple of years, public speculation has persisted about how much he takes, whether he’s currently high, or how it might affect his behavior. Last year, Musk told CNN’s Don Lemon that he has a ketamine prescription and uses the drug roughly every other week to help with depression symptoms. When Lemon asked if Musk ever abused ketamine, Musk replied, ‘I don’t think so. If you use too much ketamine you can’t really get work done,’ then said that investors in his companies should want him to keep up his drug regimen. Not everyone is convinced. The Wall Street Journal  has reported  that Musk also takes the drug recreationally, and in 2023, Ronan Farrow reported in the New Yorker that Musk’s ‘associates’ worried that ketamine, ‘alongside his isolation and his increasingly embattled relationship with the press, might contribute to his tendency to make chaotic and impulsive statements and decisions.’”

Ketamine is called a dissociative drug because during a high, which lasts about an hour, people might feel detached from their body, their emotions, or the passage of time. Frequent, heavy recreational use— say, several times a week— has been linked to cognitive effects that last beyond the high, including impaired memory, delusional thinking, superstitious beliefs, and a sense of specialness and importance. You can see why people might wonder about ketamine use from a man who is trying to usher in multi-planetary human life, who has barged into global politics and is attempting to reengineer the U.S. government. With Musk’s new political power, his cognitive and psychological health is of concern not only to shareholders of his companies’ stocks but to all Americans. His late-night posts on Twitter, mass emails to federal employees, and non sequiturs uttered on television have prompted even more questions about his drug use.

Please keep in mind that Trump has always been drawn to people who reflect his own grandiosity, detachment from reality, and inflated sense of self-importance. That’s possibly why his comfort with Musk makes such perfect sense. Musk’s ketamine abuse exacerbates traits like impaired judgment, delusional thinking and a messianic belief in his own specialness— qualities that Trump not only exhibits himself but actively admires in others. For Trump, Musk’s erratic, self-aggrandizing behavior isn’t a red flag; it’s a reflection of his own worldview, where reality bends to the will of the “great men” who shape it. Beyond the psychology, there’s also the transactional element: Trump values people who reinforce his own mythology and can serve his interests, whether through influence, wealth or sheer spectacle. Musk, in turn, has embraced the reactionary politics that fuel Trump’s movement, making their alignment less about ideology and more about shared pathology. This isn’t just a bond between two powerful men— it’s an alliance rooted in mutual delusion, where each sees a reflection of his own greatness in the other’s madness.

“Ketamine’s great strength,” wrote Love, “has always been its ability to sever humans from the world around them. It was first approved as an anesthetic in 1970, because it could make people lose consciousness without affecting the quality of their breathing. In the 1990s, as a street drug known as Special K, ketamine took ravers to euphoric states. Then, in the 2000s, researchers found that dosesof ketamine that didn’t put people to sleep could rapidly reduce symptoms of depression, because, the thinking went, the drug altered the physical circuitry of the brain. In 2019, the FDA approved a nasal spray containing a form of ketamine called esketamine (sold under the brand name Spravato) for patients with depression who hadn’t responded to other treatments. Spravato came with a list of rules for how the drug should be administered: in a certified medical setting by a health-care professional, and with limited dosage amounts determined by how long a person has been in treatment. But Spravato’s approval was followed by a surge in prescriptions for generic ketamine, which, because it’s already FDA-approved as an anesthetic, can be administered off-label without the rules that govern esketamine. (Recreational use has shot up over the past decade too.) Some providers pair low-dose injections with talk therapy. Across the country, bespoke ketamine clinics offer shots and lozenges to treat a wide variety of mental-health conditions, including anxiety and PTSD; some focus on IV drips at doses high enough that maintaining a conversation is not feasible. Few take insurance. One market report estimated that the ketamine industry was worth nearly $3.5 billion in 2023. Outside the clinic, the drug is reportedly popular among Silicon Valley’s tech elite, and a feature at some wellness retreats, including those for leadership development, corporate team building, or couples counseling.”

Research has not yet established the side effects of long-term ketamine therapy, but older studies of recreational users offer some insight on heavy, extended dosing. Celia Morgan, now a psychopharmacology professor at the University of Exeter, in England, led a 2010 study that followed 120 recreational ketamine users for a year. Even infrequent users— those who used, on average, roughly three times a month— scored higher on a delusional-thought scale than ex–ketamine users, people who took other drugs, and people who didn’t use drugs at all. Those who averaged 20 uses a month scored even higher. People believed that they were the sole recipients of secret messages, or that society and people around them were especially attuned to them. The psychological profile of a frequent ketamine user, Morgan and her team concluded, was someone who had “profound” impairments in short- and long-term memory and was “distinctly dissociated in their day-to-day existence.” Morgan’s study was not designed to determine whether people who are more likely to be delusional are also more likely to recreationally use ketamine, but Morgan told me that stopping the drug, in most cases, will dramatically reduce these side effects.

Psychedelic enthusiasts have for decades cautioned about the dangers of prolonged ketamine use, including serious damage to the bladder, intense stomach cramps, and a struggle to stop using. In 1994, the researcher D. M. Turner wrote, “A fairly large percentage of those who try Ketamine will consume it non-stop until their supply is exhausted.” John Lilly, a neurophysiologist and psychedelic researcher who once used LSD to investigate dolphin communication, famously abused ketamine until he believed that he was contacted by an extraterrestrial entity who removed his penis. “For anyone who is using a very significant amount of ketamine on a regular basis over a long period of time, I think there’s good reason to suspect that they could have different kinds of cognitive and psychological forms of impairment,” David Mathai, a psychiatrist who offers ketamine therapy to some of his patients in Miami, told me.

Such theoretical impairments would be concerning in any context— but especially when contemplating a person who has achieved enough power to be unironically described as co-president of the United States. To be sure, ketamine may have nothing to do with his actions. He may be simply acting in accordance with his far-right political ideology. Musk also famously brags that he rarely sleeps— never a good strategy for measured speech or actions.

…Swaths of the tech world have long been drawn to Stoic philosophy, which encourages a detachment from that which is out of your control. Stoicism offers excellent coping strategies in the face of adversity— useful in an industry where most start-ups fail— but taken to extremes, it can also be a pathway to disengagement from the world and people around you. Ketamine, similarly, can afford its users space between themselves and overwhelming despair, which might help explain how it can treat depression, Mathai, the Miami psychiatrist, said. But there are consequences for leaning into that escape for too long.