A Delaware judge has ruled that Elon Musk’s ketamine use can be examined as part of the ongoing shareholder lawsuit over his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter. The decision, handed down by Chancellor Kathaleen McCormick of the Delaware Court of Chancery, opens a line of inquiry that Musk’s legal team fought hard to shut down. They lost.
The case itself centers on whether Musk breached his fiduciary duties to Tesla shareholders by diverting company resources — including employee time and Tesla’s brand equity — toward his acquisition and management of Twitter, now rebranded as X. Shareholders allege Musk was distracted, erratic, and self-dealing. And now they’ll get to ask whether ketamine played a role in his decision-making during that period.
As Futurism reported, Chancellor McCormick found the drug use question relevant because shareholders have argued Musk’s judgment was impaired during key decisions affecting Tesla. Musk has publicly acknowledged using ketamine, telling journalist Don Lemon in a 2024 interview that he has a prescription for it and uses it to manage depression. He’s described it as helpful for getting out of a “negative frame of mind.” But the shareholders’ attorneys want to probe whether that use went beyond therapeutic doses and whether it influenced specific corporate actions.
This isn’t idle curiosity. Ketamine is a dissociative anesthetic with legitimate medical applications, increasingly prescribed off-label for treatment-resistant depression. At higher doses, though, it produces significant cognitive and perceptual distortions. The distinction between prescribed therapeutic use and recreational misuse matters enormously when you’re running multiple companies worth hundreds of billions of dollars.
Musk’s lawyers argued the ketamine line of questioning was irrelevant and invasive. McCormick disagreed. Her ruling doesn’t mean Musk has been found to have done anything wrong — it simply means discovery on the topic can proceed. But the implications are significant. Corporate officers owe fiduciary duties to shareholders, and if a CEO’s substance use materially impaired their judgment during consequential business decisions, that’s a legitimate area of legal scrutiny.
The broader lawsuit has been building for months. Tesla shareholders, represented by the plaintiff firm, contend that Musk’s obsessive focus on acquiring and then managing Twitter in late 2022 and 2023 came at Tesla’s expense. They point to Tesla’s stock price decline during that period, Musk’s sale of billions in Tesla shares to fund the Twitter deal, and the redeployment of Tesla engineers to work on Twitter projects. The ketamine angle adds a volatile new dimension.
Reports from The Wall Street Journal last year detailed concerns among Musk’s inner circle about his drug use, including ketamine, LSD, cocaine, and psychedelic mushrooms. Board members at both Tesla and SpaceX were reportedly worried. SpaceX executives were said to have discussed the issue internally, concerned about Musk’s federal security clearance and the company’s government contracts. Musk dismissed the reporting.
So where does this leave things? The ruling is procedural, not substantive. No findings of fact. No verdict. But it sets the stage for depositions and document production that could prove deeply uncomfortable for Musk. If internal communications reveal discussions about his drug use affecting his performance — or if witnesses testify to erratic behavior tied to substance use — the shareholders’ case gets considerably stronger.
There’s a corporate governance question lurking here too. Tesla’s board has long faced criticism for being too deferential to Musk, too willing to let him operate without meaningful oversight. Chancellor McCormick is the same judge who voided Musk’s $56 billion Tesla pay package in January 2024, finding that the board’s approval process was deeply flawed and that Musk effectively controlled the directors who were supposed to be negotiating on shareholders’ behalf. That decision is under appeal, but it established McCormick as a judge willing to hold Musk accountable to the same standards as any other corporate fiduciary.
Not a great pattern for Musk in Delaware courts.
The ketamine ruling also arrives at a politically charged moment. Musk has become one of the most influential figures in the Trump administration through his role leading the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. His public profile has never been higher, and his corporate entanglements have never been more complex. Any revelation about impaired decision-making could ripple far beyond a single shareholder lawsuit.
For industry professionals watching this case, the takeaway is straightforward. Courts are increasingly willing to treat executive health and substance use as discoverable when shareholders raise credible claims about impaired corporate governance. That’s not new law — fiduciary duty has always encompassed the obligation to exercise informed, sober judgment — but it’s being applied with unusual specificity here. And to the world’s richest man.
The case continues. Discovery will proceed. And Elon Musk’s ketamine prescription just became a matter of corporate law.
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