The interview that apparently destroyed Don Lemon's relationship with Elon Musk, because it was not fawning enough for Musk's liking, or something, is now online, and in it, Musk discusses his use of prescription ketamine.
We've known for a while now that Elon Musk is, like many Bay Area party people, a fan of ketamine. But Musk has characterized his use of the drug as purely medicinal, and prescribed by a physician. And in this new interview with Don Lemon, he says he never drinks, and that he is "almost always" sober when those late-night, very drunk-seeming tweets appear.
Lemon opens his broadcast explaining that, contrary to some media reports, his new "Don Lemon Show" was never "canceled" by X or Elon Musk.
"Yes, after months of begging me, wooing me to offer some exclusive content on his platform, Elon Musk decided to scrap the deal," Lemon explains. But the plan, he says, was always to publish videos on multiple platforms, including YouTube, IHeartRadio, and Spotify.
The interview was conducted during South By Southwest in Austin, with Musk sporting the scraggly mustache of which he's been recently fond.
Lemon asks pointed questions about the racist "Great Replacement Theory" and why Musk seems to regularly endorse it, or something like it, in his own tweets — and Musk says that he doesn't endorse the theory, per se, but that there's logic in the idea that undocumented immigrants will be come Democratic voters.
In the wide-ranging, 90-minute interview, Lemon asks Musk about using ketamine, and Musk says that he only takes "a small amount once every other week or something like that."
"There are times when I have sort of a … negative chemical state in my brain, like depression I guess, or depression that’s not linked to any negative news, and ketamine is helpful for getting one out of the negative frame of mind," Musk says. He adds that "if you use too much ketamine, you can’t really get work done. I have a lot of work, I’m typically putting in 16-hour days … so I don’t really have a situation where I can be not mentally acute for an extended period of time."
Musk goes on to say that investors in Tesla or his other companies should be glad that he's caring for his mental health "From a standpoint of Wall Street, what matters is execution," Musk says. "Are you building value for investors? Tesla is worth about as much as the rest of the car industry combined … so from an investor standpoint, if there is something I’m taking, I should keep taking it."
Musk seems to get most upset toward the end of the interview when having to respond to questions about free speech, hate speech, and the loss of advertisers on the X platform. This was the same line of questioning that led to Musk making the unwise public proclamation at a New York Times event in November that advertisers departing X to make a statement could all go fuck themselves.
Musk insists that "it’s a very short list of advertisers who are not coming back to the platform, and our advertising revenue is rising rapidly and our subscription revenue is rising rapidly and I feel very optimistic about the future of the X platform."
"You can choose where you want your advertising, what you want your advertise[ment] to appear next to, but you can’t insist on censorship of the entire platform,” he said. “If you insist on censorship of the entire platform, even where your advertising doesn’t appear, then obviously we will not want them as an advertiser."
Some commentators on CNN, Lemon's former employer, discussed this morning how it's "disturbing" that Musk insists on equating moderation of hate speech with censorship. And how it's hypocritical to to insist on unfettered free speech, but also to cancel a content partnership with Lemon over an unfavorable interview.
Musk, meanwhile, has been doubling down on the immigration stuff on X today, reposting a clip of the Lemon interview that is framed as him "educating" Lemon on how the Great Replacement Theory works. And, Musk reposted a story about the LAPD launching a task force to go after gangs of trained burglars who have been coming to California from South America to rob high-end homes, saying, "And the Biden Administration does nothing."
