NY Times accuses Elon Musk of ‘continuing to lash out' at them over drug use report

The New York Times accused Tesla CEO Elon Musk of 'lashing out' against them on Tuesday.
In May, the New York Times published a report citing 'private messages' sent to them and 'interviews with more than a dozen people who have known or worked with him' that alleged Musk's drug use was 'more intense' than publicly known as he campaigned with then-candidate Donald Trump in 2024.
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'Mr. Musk's drug consumption went well beyond occasional use,' the NYT reported. 'He told people he was taking so much ketamine, a powerful anesthetic, that it was affecting his bladder, a known effect of chronic use. He took Ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms. And he traveled with a daily medication box that held about 20 pills, including ones with the markings of the stimulant Adderall, according to a photo of the box and people who have seen it.'
Musk repeatedly denounced the article and called out the Times by posting the results of a recent drug test on his X account on Tuesday.
The paper's communications team responded to the results, saying that Musk was 'continuing to lash out' against them and stood by the story.
'Elon Musk is continuing to lash out because he doesn't like our reporting. Nothing that he's said or presented since our article about his drug use during the presidential campaign was published contradicts what we uncovered. We stand by our journalism,' the NY Times Communications account wrote.
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3 The New York Times accused Tesla CEO Elon Musk of 'lashing out' against them on Tuesday.
AFP via Getty Images
3 In May, the Times published a report citing 'private messages' sent to them and 'interviews with more than a dozen people who have known or worked with him' that alleged Musk's drug use was 'more intense' than publicly known.
REUTERS
The NYT gave the same response after Musk challenged the New York Times and Wall Street Journal to release the results of their own drug tests.
'Great idea. I hereby challenge the NYT and WSJ to take drug tests and publish the results! They won't, because those hypocrites are guilty as sin,' Musk wrote.
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The back-and-forth between the New York Times and Musk has been ongoing since the article was published on May 30.
3 Musk repeatedly denounced the article and called out the Times by posting the results of a recent drug test on his X account on Tuesday.
X/elonmusk
One day after the story was published, Musk wrote on X that the NYT was 'lying their a– off' and insisted that he had not taken ketamine in years.
The NY Times Communications account pushed back on Musk at the time, similarly accusing Musk of 'lashing out' but with 'no evidence.'
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'Kirsten Grind and Megan Twohey's thoroughly sourced report provides an important and fair look into Musk's drug use and family conflicts. They interviewed a dozen people who have known or worked with him, and saw private text messages, legal documents and photographic evidence,' the NY Times Communications account wrote. 'Elon Musk is just lashing out because he doesn't like our article. We provided Musk with multiple opportunities to reply or rebut this reporting before publication and he declined, opting instead to try to distract with a social post and no evidence.'

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USA Today

35 minutes ago

• USA Today

Could you invest your own FICA taxes? The new Social Security proposal explained

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The Hill

5 hours ago

• The Hill

Voice of America's foreign language services are vital to global peace

The Trump administration has hopefully just learned an important lesson: the strategic importance of Voice of America's foreign language services for U.S. national security. After Israel launched a full-scale war against Iran — presenting an immediate threat to American troops and vital national interests in the Middle East — Trump officials recalled back to work some VOA Persian Service journalists and broadcasters who had been put on paid administrative leave and threatened with termination. A few months before Israel's attack to destroy Iran's nuclear weapons capabilities, Trump issued an executive order, at the suggestion of Elon Musk, to scale down the broadcasting services of the U.S. Agency for Global Media to the statutory minimum. Kari Lake, Trump's advisor at USAGM, may have wanted to save more of VOA's foreign language services and broadcasting jobs, but she faithfully carried out the president's orders by proposing to reduce staffing of some key foreign language services, including the Persian Service, to just a couple of web journalists for just a few countries. I managed the VOA Polish Service when it expanded its audience and contributed to bringing a peaceful end to Communism and Russian colonialism in Poland during the Reagan administration. I sent a message advising Lake that VOA cannot handle international emergencies with only a few journalists fluent in foreign languages. When the Communist regime in Poland declared martial law in 1981, VOA's Polish Service had 15 full-time employees. We increased our broadcasts from two-and-a-half to seven hours daily almost overnight by hiring temporary help and slowly growing our staff to 25 full-time positions. We did not start from nothing or just two broadcasters. At the same time, Radio Free Europe's Polish Service, also funded by U.S. tax dollars, had over 100 employees and many more hours of daily radio broadcasts to Poland. The two outlets helped to eliminate the Warsaw Pact's military threat to America and brought democracy to the region while avoiding war and violence. Few Americans know that one of the main reasons for starting the VOA Russian Service in 1947 (and Radio Liberty soon after that) was to convince the Russians that the U.S. did not want war and would never first use nuclear weapons against Russia. We needed a communication channel in case of an emergency as well as a tool for countering disinformation. Fortunately, when the latest war in the Middle East started, full-time VOA Persian Service employees were still on paid administrative leave. They could return to work immediately after the Israeli strikes in Iran. That would not have been possible, had they already lost their jobs, as they would have soon under the Trump administration's plan — and America would have been left without a critical strategic national security asset. With Musk out of the picture (at least for now), and with the growing crisis in the Middle East, it is time for Trump officials and members of Congress from both parties to work out a reasonable plan to save and reform Voice of America. However, I do not favor returning the Agency for Global Media to its previous state. Under the influence of Obama and Biden officials, it has become one of the most bloated bureaucracies in the federal government. USAGM's former leadership hired journalists who engaged in partisan news reporting, allowed a reporter to accompany Biden as his guest to an official ceremony and recruited a Russian freelancer, ignoring signs he was a Russian spy. They created a work environment in which several VOA journalists felt free to post on their social media accounts 'death to Israel' and 'f*ck Trump' memes. These partisan executives have already resigned or retired. The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform has launched an investigation into charges that former USAGM officials 'routinely and improperly utilized visa programs to employ poorly vetted foreign nationals, including from nations adverse to' the U.S. and awarded grants to entities 'despite major conflicts of interest.' But those journalists in VOA's foreign language services who did nothing wrong should not be punished for the sins of their former bosses. American citizens and permanent residents are more easily vetted and should always have priority in hiring over individuals residing abroad. Although he was appointed during the Biden administration, VOA Director Michael Abramowitz, who remains on paid leave, had taken steps to curb partisan excesses of some VOA English news service reporters while increasing support for the work of the best and most critical VOA foreign language services. Abramowitz, a former head of Freedom House, is the first VOA director in a long time who understands the crucial role of foreign language broadcasting. I have always believed that it isn't a bad idea to have a competent leader at VOA who is from the opposite party from the one in the White House. This could help prevent partisan bias, although such an arrangement is unlikely in the current political environment. While reducing the Voice of America to a few journalists is a wholly unworkable proposition, shrinking the USAGM bureaucracy to just a few people and combining its media operations to avoid duplication is an excellent idea that would save millions of dollars — which then can be used for broadcasts to Iran, China, Tibet, Russia, Cuba, North Korea and a few other countries. Partisan reporting at Voice of America primarily occurred in the VOA English newsroom rather than in the foreign language services. VOA English newsroom reporters and editors were the ones who, at first, did not report that Biden's performance at his pre-election debate with Trump was in any way diminished. Some VOA English reporters refused to call Hamas 'terrorists' after the Oct. 7, 2023 attack. By law, VOA cannot duplicate the work of private media, and there is no major English-speaking foreign country that threatened the U.S. or lacks a free press. Voice of America does not require a large team of journalists to prepare news reports in English that duplicate the work of CNN, The New York Times or Fox News. A small team producing a roundup of American news from multiple sources without ideological censorship is more than sufficient. What VOA needs are foreign language services that use the best technology to deliver uncensored news otherwise unavailable from private outlets to countries that may pose a threat to America's security and to international peace. Congress and the Trump administration should preserve VOA to help prevent the U.S. from becoming entangled in foreign wars. Ted Lipien was Voice of America's Polish service chief during Poland's struggle for democracy and VOA's acting associate director. He served from 2020 to 2021 as the president of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

Atlantic

6 hours ago

• Atlantic

The Myth of the Gen Z Red Wave

Are the kids all right-wing? Donald Trump won the 2024 election thanks in part to increased support from young voters. Some experts see this as a sign of a generational sea change. As the prominent Democratic data scientist David Shor pointed out in a recent podcast conversation with the New York Times columnist Ezra Klein, 75-year-old white men were more likely to support the Democratic presidential candidate, Kamala Harris, than 20-year-old white men were. 'Young people have gone from being the most progressive generation since the Baby Boomers, and maybe even in some ways more so, to becoming potentially the most conservative generation that we've experienced maybe in 50 or 60 years,' Shor said. If Shor is right—if Gen Z (now ages 12 to 30) is durably to the right of previous generations—a significant part of the Democratic coalition is gone. Luckily for the party, however, he probably isn't. The best available evidence suggests that the youth-vote shift in 2024 was more a one-off event than an ideological realignment. Faith Hill: The not-so-woke Generation Z The Cooperative Election Study, one of the largest politically focused surveys of Americans, goes back to 2006 and just released its 2024 data. Those data aren't perfect—they have yet to be validated against the voter file, meaning they are based on self-reported voter turnout. But they are still a much better source for studying generational shifts than data from just one year, like Shor's. The CES is also more comprehensive than the average election poll, asking about voters' ideological self-identification, party affiliation, and views on specific issues. Consistent with other reports, the CES data show that young adults (ages 18 to 29) voted for Trump in 2024 at a much higher rate than they did in 2020. The trend was especially pronounced among young men, whose support for Trump increased by 10 percentage points since 2020, compared with 6 points for young women. Although some recent polling suggests that 18-to-21-year-olds were more likely to support Trump than 22-to-29-year-olds, the CES data show the younger and older subgroups voting for Trump at near-identical rates in 2024. Young adults were also more likely to vote for Republican House candidates than in 2020, though the change was not as large as in the presidential race. But voting for a Republican candidate isn't the same as identifying as conservative. Here is where the CES data cast doubt on the notion that Gen Z is an especially right-leaning generation. According to my analysis of the CES data, young adults have actually become less likely to identify as conservative in surveys during presidential-election years since 2008. The trend is not due to increases in the nonwhite population; fewer white young adults identified as conservative in 2024 (29 percent) than did in 2016 (33 percent). What about young adults' positions on specific political issues? For the most part, they are more liberal than previous generations. (No single definition of generational cutoffs exists. In my research and writing, I define the Millennial generation as being born from 1980 to 1994, and Gen Z from 1995 to 2012.) In the 2024 CES survey, 69 percent of young adults supported granting legal status to undocumented immigrants who have not been convicted of felony crimes and who have held jobs and paid taxes for at least three years, up from 58 percent in 2012, the last year all 18-to-29-year-olds were Millennials. Also in the 2024 survey, 63 percent agreed that 'generations of slavery and discrimination have created conditions that make it difficult for blacks to work their way out of the lower class,' up from 42 percent in 2012. Support for legal abortion among young adults rose from 46 percent in 2012 to 69 percent in 2024, though the question was worded somewhat differently in those two years. Only one belief shifted in the conservative direction: 62 percent of young adults in 2024 supported increasing border patrols at the U.S.-Mexico border, up from 45 percent in 2012. From the May 2023 issue: The myth of the broke Millennial The trend looks different if we look at data on partisanship rather than ideology. The Democratic Party has steadily been losing market share among young adults since 2008, mostly because young people have grown likelier to identify as independents; Gen Z is only slightly more Republican than Millennials were at the same age. These young independents tend to vote for Democrats, but, given their lack of party affiliation, their votes are more likely to swing from one election to the next. Indeed, most of the change over the past two elections appears to have been driven by young independent voters breaking for Trump in 2024 when they didn't in 2020. Given that young voters have not become more likely to identify as conservative or hold broadly conservative political opinions, Gen Z might not be the disaster for Democrats that Shor and others are predicting. The 2024 election might have been an anomalous event in which young people's deep dissatisfaction with the economy, especially the inflation that hit their just-starting-out budgets, drove them to want change. Another distinct possibility is that, going forward, Gen Z will vote for whichever party is not currently in office. Gen Z is a uniquely pessimistic generation. In data I analyzed for my book Generations, Gen Z high-school seniors were more likely than previous generations at the same age to agree with the statements 'It is hard for me to hold out much hope for the world' and 'I often wonder if there is any real purpose to my life in light of the world situation.' Young Americans today are also unconvinced that their country is anything special: Only 27 percent of high-school seniors think the U.S. system is 'still the best in the world,' down from 67 percent in the early 1980s, according to a long-running national survey. If young people's attitudes persist as they get older, Gen Z might never be pleased with how things are going in the country. They'll want to 'vote the bastards out' in the next election no matter which party is in power. Compared with the idea of a new and persistent conservatism in young voters, a generalized pessimism bodes better for the Democrats in 2026 or 2028. But if Democrats regain power, Gen Z might turn on them once again, repeating the cycle in an endless loop of political dissatisfaction.