High Times
The New York Times ran an excoriating investigation this week into Nicole Shanahan, the vice presidential running mate of Robert F. Kennedy Jr — yes, the same third-party candidate who recently claimed that a worm had eaten part of his brain.
The story is deeply unflattering, suggesting that RFK Jr likely picked Shanahan as a running mate primarily because she has an enormous amount of money to contribute to his campaign. She gained most of that fortune, which reportedly totals over $1 billion, in the settlement from a divorce with Sergey Brin, the cofounder of Google — a split precipitated, according to the newspaper’s reporting, by a ketamine-fueled tryst with SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk.
“At that party, Elon Musk and Ms. Shanahan took ketamine, a popular party drug that is legal with a prescription, and disappeared together for several hours, according to four people briefed on the event and documents related to it,” the NYT reported. “Ms. Shanahan later told Mr. Brin that she had had sex with Mr. Musk, three of the people said. She also relayed the details to friends, family and advisers.”
Horsing Around
To close Musk-watchers, there won’t be a lot of unfamiliar words in that last paragraph. The CEO has been dogged by rumors of both infidelity — including prior allegations of the affair with Shanahan — as well as drug use, including ketamine.
But the story also contains new details that look unfavorable for Musk. For one thing, the multihyphenate billionaire has defended his ketamine use in the past by saying it was prescribed. While it’s true that there’s some interest in potentially therapeutic mental health benefits of the drug, there’s also a lot of expert skepticism. Most people, at the end of the day, just take it to have a good time — and slamming it at a party in the context of an extramarital dalliance doesn’t sound very clinical at all.
That’s not where the lack of professionalism ends, either. Musk has a longstanding frenemy dynamic with the cofounders of Google, falling out with Brin’s cofounder Larry Page over Musk’s fear of artificial intelligence (though confusingly, Musk has now seemingly reversed his AI-cautious outlook and started his own AI venture.)
There’s a clear line, though, between disagreeing with someone’s view on tech and sleeping with their spouse as some sort of macho power play — a longstanding pattern in Musk’s behavior.
One thing’s for clear: as usual, the rich think that special rules should apply to them.
“I’m shocked the NYT is letting you run something like this,” Shanahan texted the New York Times in response to questions about the story.
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