Attorney, journalist, and Elon Musk biographer Seth Abramson eviscerated both Elon Musk and his “fanboys” who have attempted to use the billionaire’s IQ as an indication of his intellectual prowess in a series of messages shared on X Thursday evening and into Friday. “You are in a cult,” he wrote in one before he later noted Musk “has zero *personal* intellectual achievements.”
“As an Elon Musk biographer, I would peg his IQ as between 100 and 110,” Abramson tweeted Thursday afternoon. “There’s zero evidence in his biography of anything higher. And I want to repeat that now, lest you think it a typo. There’s zero evidence, from his life history, of Musk having anything higher than a 110 IQ.”
The author then stepped away from the platform (“on the basis of this not being a platform worth spending time on”) only to return Friday morning and find his initial message had gone viral in online MAGA communities — and “because Nate Silver thinks Carlyle’s 1800s theory of history, the Great Man Theory, is still relevant to historians in 2025,” Abramson continued.
What followed was a lengthy series of messages, each designed to decimate Musk’s reputation among some circles as a kind of genius.
Musk “was sued for stealing the idea for Zip2—which fired him as soon as investors got involved” and “was going to run PayPal into the ground after his company merged with it—again he was fired.” He then “invested in Tesla when it was distressed and quickly began running it into the ground.”
• He was sued for stealing the idea for Zip2—which fired him as soon as investors got involved. He was going to run PayPal into the ground after his company merged with it—again he was fired. He invested in Tesla when it was distressed and quickly began running it into the ground.
— Seth Abramson (@SethAbramson) February 21, 2025
Musk founded Zip2, described as “a sort of digital Yellowpages” by Belmont Hill School’s The Panel Online, with his brother. The outlet reported that in an attempt to impress investors in the company, Musk “created a large, fake casing around the Zip2 computer to make it seem like an extremely advanced supercomputer” — a move that worked, but investors who put $3 million into the company did so only after Musk agreed to step down so “someone more experienced to take his place.”
The code used by the program, which Musk taught himself, “was soon exposed to be so scrambled that a majority of the program had to be rewritten by more advanced programmers.”
Musk ultimately returned to the company as CEO and benefitted financially when it was sold to COMPAQ in 1999. He used the $22 million his 7% share brought in to an “internet bank” at X.com — the same company he merged with the founders of Paypal. He was named CEO after the merger in April 2000 but was removed from the position six months later.
• I account Elon Musk's idea for SpaceX to be more or less the only clearly good idea he has ever publicly had, though it required heavy lifting mostly from a powerful Black man for it to become a success, which may be why Musk has so much resentment for the former president now.
— Seth Abramson (@SethAbramson) February 21, 2025
SpaceX, Abramson continued, is Musk’s only “truly successful and novel company” and a chunk of its success was owed to President Obama, who Musk “successfully lobbied” after “Russians had laughed Musk out of Moscow.”
“I needn’t tell you the Boring Company is a failure that has done no more than produce an illegal flamethrower for fun, one that cannot be legally shipped and has caused lots of people legal issues,” Abramson added. “Neuralink is mired in ethics investigations, and Musk does none of its science.”
“Everything” Musk has said about Twitter/X was “a lie,” he also said, “and business schools will teach how he ran this platform into the ground for 200 years.”
“Feel free to Google all the things Musk did to scam people into thinking he’d made a successful foray into robotics,” Abramson continued. “It does not take intelligence to throw money around and buy a company or buy a politician. Anyone would/could.”
“It does not take intelligence to, having thrown money at a politician, use the clout you accrued from that to advantage your own businesses—businesses you are well aware you have nothing to do with the success of, which is why you mess around with their patents to hide that fact.”
“If you assign intelligence to just spending money, you’re in a cult,” he also added. “If you attach intelligence to simply owning a successful company whose work on a day-to-day basis you have nothing to do with and who you are considerably more of a hindrance to than a help to, you’re in a cult.”
• It is also a particularly American disease to confuse wealth with intelligence and corporations with those who own them. In most of the world the conversation we are having would seem utterly preposterous, as again there is no evidence of Musk having *intellectual* achievements.
— Seth Abramson (@SethAbramson) February 21, 2025
Toward the end of his messages, Abramson noted, “It is also a particularly American disease to confuse wealth with intelligence and corporations with those who own them. In most of the world the conversation we are having would seem utterly preposterous, as again there is no evidence of Musk having *intellectual* achievements.”
“I don’t find IQ to be a valuable measure,” he also clarified. “I introduced the term to this conversation because it’s used by *you fans* as some sort of supposed proof of Musk’s intelligence—though none of you have any proof whatsoever of any IQ test the man’s ever taken.”
Some Trump Officials Push Back Against Musk’s Ultimatum to Workers
The F.B.I. director, Kash Patel, the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, and others told employees not to respond to a directive from Mr. Musk to summarize their accomplishments.
Tech billionaire, a close adviser to the US president, is a vocal supporter of Germany’s far-right AfD party
Sales of new Tesla cars almost halved in Europe last month, indicating waning demand for the US carmaker’s vehicles as its chief executive Elon Musk intervened repeatedly in the politics on both sides of the Atlantic.
The Texas-based carmaker sold 9,945 vehicles in Europe in January, down 45% from last year’s 18,161, according to data from the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association (ACEA). Tesla’s share of the market dropped to 1% from 1.8%.
The tech billionaire, a close adviser to the US president, has become a vocal supporter of Germany’s far-right AfD party in recent months, and described it in January as the “best hope for the future” in Germany. On Monday, he called the party’s co-leader Alice Weidel to congratulate her on the party’s performance in Germany’s national election after it doubled its support from the previous election.
Musk also waded into the UK’s political row about grooming gangs, publicly accusing Keir Starmer and other senior politicians of covering up the scandal, despite there being no evidence of any organised cover-up.
Emmanuel Macron, the French president, joined the Norwegian, British and German leaders in early January in responding to a barrage of hostile social media posts by Musk backing far-right political parties and criticising leftwing politicians in Europe.
Tesla sold 1,277 new cars last month in Germany, its lowest monthly total since July 2021, according to Bloomberg calculations. Sales in France plummeted 63% in its worst performance in the country since August 2022.
The company also registered fewer vehicles in the UK than its Chinese electric car rival BYD for the first time. Tesla’s sales fell by nearly 8% in an EV market that grew by 42% last month.
The slump came as the European market for new battery-electric cars grew by 34% to 124,341 units, capturing a 15% share of the total car market, the figures from the ACEA showed.
This could suggest that Musk’s interventions in European political affairs and senior role in Donald Trump’s administration defunding and depopulating the US government – including shutting down its aid programme – are leading to a consumer backlash.
Three of the four largest markets in Europe, which together account for nearly two-thirds of all battery-electric car sales, recorded double-digit gains: Germany (+53.5%), Belgium (+37.2%) and the Netherlands (+28.2%), while France posted a slight dip of 0.5%.
The overall car market shrank by 2.1% in January. Many of the EU’s big markets recorded declines, with France down by 6.2%, Italy 5.8% lower and Germany losing 2.8%. Spain, however, recorded a 5.3% increase.
Last month, during Elon Musk’s appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference, as he hoisted a chain saw in the air, stumbled over some of his words, and questioned whether there was really gold stored in Fort Knox, people on his social-media platform, X, started 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.” (Musk did not respond to my requests for comment. In a post on X responding to The New Yorker’s story, Musk wrote, “Tragic that Ronan Farrow is a puppet of the establishment and against the people.”)
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 X, mass emails to federal employees, and non sequiturs uttered on television have prompted even more questions about his drug use.
Ketamine’s great strength 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 doses of 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.
Musk hasn’t publicly acknowledged the risks of ketamine, despite having once claimed that SSRIs, the drugs commonly used to treat depression, “zombify” patients. Other highly visible ketamine promoters tend to do the same. Dylan Beynon, the founder of the ketamine telemedicine company Mindbloom, recently wrote on X, “Ketamine is not physically addictive. SSRIs are very difficult to wean off of for many.” (Beynon’s wife, the former head of engineering at Mindbloom, now works at DOGE.) Although ketamine doesn’t lead to the same kind of physical withdrawal symptoms as opioids or alcohol, Morgan, the University of Exeter professor, said its abuse potential is widely accepted, partly because people build a tolerance to the drug very quickly. In the United Kingdom, where health data are more centralized, more than 2,000 people sought treatment for ketamine addiction in 2023. More to the point, ketamine’s most dramatic risks depend on simply how much ketamine a person takes, and for how long.
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.
Elon Musk, who is leading President Donald Trump’s efforts to shrink the federal government, on Monday called Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Arizona) a “traitor” after the senator detailed his visit to Ukraine in posts shared on X.
Kelly, a Navy veteran and retired astronaut, visited Ukraine over the weekend for the third time since Russia invaded the country. His trip came a week after Trump pushed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky out of the White House after Zelensky asked for assurance that the United States would support Ukraine if Russian President Vladimir Putin were to violate any peace deal struck between the nations. Trump — who was urging Ukraine to engage in peace talks with Russia and sign a deal giving the United States access to its minerals — then paused U.S. military assistance to Ukraine.
In Kelly’s posts, he said, “Everyone wants this war to end, but any agreement has to protect Ukraine’s security and can’t be a giveaway to Putin.” He said that the pause in U.S. military aid “has only made it harder for Ukraine in their fight against Russia” and that “stopping the transfer of these weapons only helps the Russians.”
He continued later in the thread: “Donald Trump says he trusts Putin and is trying to make him look like a friend and a good guy. I look forward to seeing Putin rot in prison.”
Musk, who oversees the U.S. DOGE Service, replied to Kelly’s posts, “You are a traitor.”
Kelly then responded: “Traitor? Elon, if you don’t understand that defending freedom is a basic tenet of what makes America great and keeps us safe, maybe you should leave it to those of us who do.”
