At last Elon Musk makes sense. He was a bad drug dream

It’s a truism that drug addiction does terrible things to the individual’s soul. What is less discussed is what it does to the communal soul. I was unsurprised to hear that Elon Musk – he of the wonky Hitler salute and can-I-be-your-sperm-donor-please offer to the world – is, as the New York Times reports, a ketamine head who was wasted for some of the 2024 American general election campaign. It’s almost a relief to know for sure, isn’t it? Because if they’re mad, we are not; truth is the greatest high of them all.

Now Musk, so strange to watch, makes sense at last. We can name the technical term for his time in the White House – his job was to make the boss look sane, and he did – with some accuracy: he was the K-hole with the A-hole.

It was all a bad drug dream, and now it is over: Musk has stepped back, and there are dregs of hope in that. Even so, he punched a hole in the American state with ketamine, ecstasy and ’shrooms. He played video games, binge ate and posted things on X like: “Tomorrow we unleash the anomaly in the matrix” and “This is not something on the chessboard, so they will be quite surprised. ‘Lasers’ from space.” He wore two baseball caps in the White House – drug addiction is the disease that demands more of everything – and appeared with a mystery bruise on his face (which he has blamed on one of his children). Who did it? If I had to guess, I would say, with total conviction: he did.

Musk has the instincts – the personality – of the tyrant: the man on a cartoon rocket, fleeing from himself to his personal Götterdämmerung with his father. (It is always the father.) No wonder he wants a thousand children to save him – after all, babies are born relatively sane.

I’m not surprised that Donald Trump, who also has the instincts of a tyrant, was drawn to Musk. There’s nothing a bad man loves more than a worse one. Trump, of course, is not a conventional drug addict, because his drugs are attention, himself and, above all, women.