One of President Donald Trump’s top aides has some thoughts on Elon Musk.
In a series of interviews with Vanity Fair published on Tuesday, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles weighed in on Musk’s time as the de facto leader of DOGE, her thoughts on the Musk-led shuttering of USAID, and Musk’s personality quirks.
“The challenge with Elon is keeping up with him,” Wiles told the outlet, calling Musk an “avowed ketamine” user who “sleeps in a sleeping bag” in an office building adjacent to the White House during the daytime. “He’s an odd, odd duck, as I think geniuses are. You know, it’s not helpful, but he is his own person.”
Asked about a meme Musk had reposted and later unshared about public sector workers murdering people under the dictatorships of Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Zedong, Wiles said: “I think that’s when he’s microdosing.”
In June, Musk denied being a current ketamine user, writing on X that he was “NOT taking drugs.” He said he’d had a prescription for the drug “a few years ago” but hadn’t taken it since then.
Reached for further comment on Tuesday, a spokesperson for Musk’s xAI told Business Insider: “Legacy Media Lies.”
In a separate interview on Monday with the New York Times, Wiles denied commenting on Musk’s drug use, saying she “wouldn’t have said it and I wouldn’t know.” But the Times reported that the journalist Chris Whipple, who interviewed Wiles for Vanity Fair, played a tape for the Times in which she could be heard making the comments.
One of the most notable features of Musk’s White House tenure was the sudden dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID.
“I was initially aghast,” Wiles told Vanity Fair. “Because I think anybody that pays attention to government and has ever paid attention to USAID believed, as I did, that they do very good work.”
Wiles said the dismantling of USAID was “not the way” she would do it, and that she told Musk that he “can’t just lock people out of their offices.”
“Elon’s attitude is you have to get it done fast. If you’re an incrementalist, you just won’t get your rocket to the moon,” Wiles said. “And so with that attitude, you’re going to break some china. But no rational person could think the USAID process was a good one. Nobody.”
Musk left the White House in the spring and had a falling-out with Trump over the “Big Beautiful Bill,” though the two men appear to have mended their relationship in recent months.
Wiles wrote on X on Tuesday morning that the Vanity Story was a “disingenuously framed hit piece,” and that “significant context was disregarded” in order to “paint an overwhelmingly chaotic and negative narrative about the President and our team.”
Asked about Wiles’s comments, the White House sent Business Insider a supportive statement from Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt.
“Chief of Staff Susie Wiles has helped President Trump achieve the most successful first 11 months in office of any President in American history,” Leavitt said. “President Trump has no greater or more loyal advisor than Susie. The entire Administration is grateful for her steady leadership and united fully behind her.”
