Susie Wiles, President Donald Trump’s White House chief of staff, made a number of surprisingly candid remarks to a Vanity Fair reporter over the past year, according to two new articles published Tuesday. The articles cover everything from the Jan. 6 pardons to the Epstein files. But it’s her take on Elon Musk that may raise quite a few eyebrows in the world of tech—not for what Wiles said, but for the simple fact that she said it out loud to a journalist.
Wiles refers to Musk as “an avowed ketamine [user],” according to Vanity Fair in the first of two articles. In a follow-up interview, the New York Times asked Wiles about that quote and she denied saying it.
“That’s ridiculous,” Wiles said, according to the Times. “I wouldn’t have said it and I wouldn’t know.” But the Times says Vanity Fair played an audio recording of her saying it. Gizmodo has not heard the audio recording.
Musk has previously said he used small doses of ketamine to treat depression but has denied taking other forms of recreational drugs. The Wall Street Journal‘s reporting from early 2024 was the first time a large, reputable media outlet investigated the extent of Musk’s purported drug use. The Journal said Musk had used ketamine, LSD, cocaine, ecstasy, and psychedelic mushrooms dating back to at least 2018. And executives at Musk’s companies, like Tesla and SpaceX, were reportedly worried about it.
Back in May of this year, the New York Times published a report that said “Musk’s drug consumption went well beyond occasional use,” and he was taking so much it was “affecting his bladder, a known effect of chronic use.” The Times suggested that Musk’s drug use was one of the reasons he made a Nazi-style salute on Jan. 20, the day of Trump’s second inauguration, an assumption that seemed reasonable given his erratic jumping on stage that day. An appearance at CPAC the following month, complete with a chainsaw, had a similarly unhinged aesthetic.
Musk’s work as head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency put the billionaire in close proximity to Wiles, who also talked about the SpaceX CEO’s strange sleep patterns, saying “he sleeps in a sleeping bag in the EOB [Executive Office Building] in the daytime. And he’s an odd, odd duck, as I think geniuses are.”
Trump’s chief of staff also seemed disturbed by Musk’s unilateral dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which was done as one of his first big acts of vandalism against the federal government. The way Wiles tells it, Musk was behind the effort and she insisted Trump “doesn’t know the details of these smallish agencies.”
Wiles suggested that she didn’t want to see USAID go, especially not in the haphazard way it was done, telling Vanity Fair, “no rational person could think the USAID process was a good one. Nobody.”
Vanity Fair reports that former president George W. Bush even got involved behind the scenes in order to save the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), a program Bush launched in 2003 and which depends on USAID grants. PEPFAR has prevented over 5 million babies from being born with HIV, according to the State Department’s own estimates from 2023.
Efforts to reach Musk through his companies were unsuccessful Tuesday. Gizmodo will update this article if we hear back.
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