Daily Archives: January 12, 2024

Over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal published a scandalousreport about multi-hyphenate CEO Elon Musk's alleged drug habit, including the purported use of psychedelic substances like LSD, magic mushrooms, and other mind-altering drugs like cannabis, MDMA, and cocaine.

The newspaper singled out a 2017 SpaceX staff meeting as a noteworthy turning point for the mercurial entrepreneur, with several sources saying his strange behavior suggested he could have been on drugs at the time. One of the WSJ's sources described the event as "nonsensical," "unhinged," and "cringeworthy."

Now, SpaceX has published an excruciating 73-minute live stream of the meeting in an effort to clear Musk's name. But in many ways, the video instead raises even more questions following the WSJ's piece.

Sure, the video demonstrates that the newspaper's sources might've been wrong about one claim: that SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell had to fully take over the meeting.

But Shotwell does do her level best to defuse Musk's bizarre behavior, in which he constantly struggles to complete sentences, repeats himself over and over, embarks on peculiar digressions, and at one point appears confused about what day of the week it is, confusing Friday for Tuesday.

"Im doing color commentary," Shotwell says at one point as Musk struggles. "We didnt practice this, by the way. This comedy routine, its all extemporaneous."

Overall, the video does little to convince the viewer that Musk is fully okay. He seems relentlessly jitteryand his speech is filled with excruciating stutters and pauses.

In one instance, he puts on "Ring of Fire" by Johnny Cash on his smartphone,then puts it back in his pocket with the song still playing. He then takes it back out again and has to hand it off to Shotwell to turn off the audio.

"Sorry, I got almost no sleep last night," he says. "Brain's not working properly."

To be clear, Musk has never been the poster child of public speaking. He's long struggled to string coherent sentences together, or gone off on tangents mid-sentence.

Whether his particularly striking behavior during the newly-released video can be chalked up to drug or alcohol use, a brutal hangover, or simple sleep deprivation is difficult to say.But combined with the other allegations in theWSJ's reporting, it's hard not to wonder.

Meanwhile, Musk joked on his social media platform X that he would "definitely take" narcotics" if they improved his "net productivity over time."

"After that one puff with Rogan, I agreed, at NASAs request, to do three years of random drug testing, Musk tweeted, referring to the time he took a hit off a blunt during a fateful interview with podcaster Joe Rogan in 2018. "Not even trace quantities were found of any drugs or alcohol."

Nonetheless, the WSJ maintains that multiple sources claimed that his drug use was extensive, something that's especially concerning considering his companies' multi-billion dollar government contracts.

In short, it's impossible to tell with any degree of certainty whether Musk was on drugs during important staff meetings over six years ago. But while Musk claims to have submitted himself to drug tests over years, the public has yet to see the results of these tests.

Given his erratic behavior at the event, as well as his well-documented tendency to mislead and lie, there's certainly still a case to be made.

Whether these reports will lead to anything is doubtful, though. Analysts are already predicting that investors at Musk's EV maker Tesla "won't care" about the WSJ's allegations.

But they're not laughing, either. Especially following his disastrous takeover of X-formerly-Twitter, Musk's distractions and off-color antics have greatly strained his relationship with investors.

More on Musk: Twitter Suddenly Suspends Journalists Critical of Elon Musk

Read more:
SpaceX Releases Bizarre Video in Attempt to Prove Elon Wasn't on Drugs - Futurism

Image by Getty / Futurism

Until now, scientists somehow didn't know exactlywhat made pee yellow.

But that just may have finally changed.In a new study published in the journalNature Microbiology, a multidisciplinary group of scientists out of the University of Maryland reported on their findings about a middleman enzyme called bilirubin reductase, which had long evaded researchers as they tried to figure out which precise compounds resulted in urine's distinct yellow hue.

To be clear, as Healthline reports, scientists had known for more than 125 years that on a high level, urine gets its color from the disposal of old red blood cells as they degrade in our livers.

But although the process by which urine became yellow was known, the middle-man of compounds couldn't be captured until genome sequencing technology became advanced enough to break down the building blocks of pee.

"Our work to find [bilirubin reductase] relied on combining experimental screening with genomic analysis, an approach that has only become possible with the isolation of more gut bacterial species and the advancement of genome sequencing technology," UMD cell biologist and molecular geneticist and paper co-author Brantley Hall told Healthline.

"Unfortunately, gut microbes can be challenging to study," Hall added. "The gut is a low-oxygen environment, and many of the bacteria in our guts cant survive if too much oxygen is present, making them difficult to grow and perform experiments on in labs. This ultimately meant that only a handful of bacterial species had ever been identified as being able to metabolize bilirubin, limiting the amount of data that was available."

After finally being able to isolate gut bacteria long enough, the scientists eventually found that bilirubin reductase, abbreviated as BilR, was the enzyme that took the orange bilirubin gut compound and transformed it into urobilin in the liver.

Beyond finding the missing piss link, this discovery could also help scientists and doctors understand and treat jaundice in infants, as well as other conditions related to bilirubin breakdown failure including gallstones and inflammatory bowel disease in adults and, less commonly, other disorders in which bilirubin builds up so much that people become extremely sick, get brain damage, and can even die.

At the end of the day, however, it's also extremely exciting that scientists have figured this out at all.

"Its remarkable that an everyday biological phenomenon went unexplained for so long," Hall exclaimed, "and our team is excited to be able to explain it."

More on bodily functions: Guy Who Used Son as a"Blood Boy"Says Elon Musk Will"Fire YouandLeave YoutoDie"

Read more:
Scientists Have Been Studying Your Pee and They Finally Have Answers - Futurism