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Last month, during Elon Musk’s appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference, as he hoisted a chain saw in the air, stumbled over some of his words, and questioned whether there was really gold stored in Fort Knox, people on his social-media platform, X, started posting about ketamine.

Musk has said he uses ketamine regularly, so for the past couple of years, public speculation has persisted about how much he takes, whether he’s currently high, or how it might affect his behavior. Last year, Musk told CNN’s Don Lemon that he has a ketamine prescription and uses the drug roughly every other week to help with depression symptoms. When Lemon asked if Musk ever abused ketamine, Musk replied, “I don’t think so. If you use too much ketamine you can’t really get work done,” then said that investors in his companies should want him to keep up his drug regimen. Not everyone is convinced. The Wall Street Journal has reported that Musk also takes the drug recreationally, and in 2023, Ronan Farrow reported in The New Yorker that Musk’s “associates” worried that ketamine, “alongside his isolation and his increasingly embattled relationship with the press, might contribute to his tendency to make chaotic and impulsive statements and decisions.” (Musk did not respond to my requests for comment. In a post on X responding to The New Yorker’s story, Musk wrote, “Tragic that Ronan Farrow is a puppet of the establishment and against the people.”)

Ketamine is called a dissociative drug because during a high, which lasts about an hour, people might feel detached from their body, their emotions, or the passage of time. Frequent, heavy recreational use—say, several times a week—has been linked to cognitive effects that last beyond the high, including impaired memory, delusional thinking, superstitious beliefs, and a sense of specialness and importance. You can see why people might wonder about ketamine use from a man who is trying to usher in multi-planetary human life, who has barged into global politics and is attempting to reengineer the U.S. government. With Musk’s new political power, his cognitive and psychological health is of concern not only to shareholders of his companies’ stocks but to all Americans. His late-night posts on X, mass emails to federal employees, and non sequiturs uttered on television have prompted even more questions about his drug use.

Ketamine’s great strength has always been its ability to sever humans from the world around them. It was first approved as an anesthetic in 1970, because it could make people lose consciousness without affecting the quality of their breathing. In the 1990s, as a street drug known as Special K, ketamine took ravers to euphoric states. Then, in the 2000s, researchers found that doses of ketamine that didn’t put people to sleep could rapidly reduce symptoms of depression, because, the thinking went, the drug altered the physical circuitry of the brain. In 2019, the FDA approved a nasal spray containing a form of ketamine called esketamine (sold under the brand name Spravato) for patients with depression who hadn’t responded to other treatments. Spravato came with a list of rules for how the drug should be administered: in a certified medical setting by a health-care professional, and with limited dosage amounts determined by how long a person has been in treatment.

But Spravato’s approval was followed by a surge in prescriptions for generic ketamine, which, because it’s already FDA-approved as an anesthetic, can be administered off-label without the rules that govern esketamine. (Recreational use has shot up over the past decade too.) Some providers pair low-dose injections with talk therapy. Across the country, bespoke ketamine clinics offer shots and lozenges to treat a wide variety of mental-health conditions, including anxiety and PTSD; some focus on IV drips at doses high enough that maintaining a conversation is not feasible. Few take insurance. One market report estimated that the ketamine industry was worth nearly $3.5 billion in 2023. Outside the clinic, the drug is reportedly popular among Silicon Valley’s tech elite, and a feature at some wellness retreats, including those for leadership development, corporate team building, or couples counseling.

Read: The horseshoe theory of psychedelics

Research has not yet established the side effects of long-term ketamine therapy, but older studies of recreational users offer some insight on heavy, extended dosing. Celia Morgan, now a psychopharmacology professor at the University of Exeter, in England, led a 2010 study that followed 120 recreational ketamine users for a year. Even infrequent users—those who used, on average, roughly three times a month—scored higher on a delusional-thought scale than ex–ketamine users, people who took other drugs, and people who didn’t use drugs at all. Those who averaged 20 uses a month scored even higher. People believed that they were the sole recipients of secret messages, or that society and people around them were especially attuned to them. The psychological profile of a frequent ketamine user, Morgan and her team concluded, was someone who had “profound” impairments in short- and long-term memory and was “distinctly dissociated in their day-to-day existence.” Morgan’s study was not designed to determine whether people who are more likely to be delusional are also more likely to recreationally use ketamine, but Morgan told me that stopping the drug, in most cases, will dramatically reduce these side effects.

Psychedelic enthusiasts have for decades cautioned about the dangers of prolonged ketamine use, including serious damage to the bladder, intense stomach cramps, and a struggle to stop using. In 1994, the researcher D. M. Turner wrote, “A fairly large percentage of those who try Ketamine will consume it non-stop until their supply is exhausted.” John Lilly, a neurophysiologist and psychedelic researcher who once used LSD to investigate dolphin communication, famously abused ketamine until he believed that he was contacted by an extraterrestrial entity who removed his penis. “For anyone who is using a very significant amount of ketamine on a regular basis over a long period of time, I think there’s good reason to suspect that they could have different kinds of cognitive and psychological forms of impairment,” David Mathai, a psychiatrist who offers ketamine therapy to some of his patients in Miami, told me.

Such theoretical impairments would be concerning in any context—but especially when contemplating a person who has achieved enough power to be unironically described as co-president of the United States. To be sure, ketamine may have nothing to do with his actions. He may be simply acting in accordance with his far-right political ideology. Musk also famously brags that he rarely sleeps—never a good strategy for measured speech or actions.

Read: Elon Musk is president

Musk hasn’t publicly acknowledged the risks of ketamine, despite having once claimed that SSRIs, the drugs commonly used to treat depression, “zombify” patients. Other highly visible ketamine promoters tend to do the same. Dylan Beynon, the founder of the ketamine telemedicine company Mindbloom, recently wrote on X, “Ketamine is not physically addictive. SSRIs are very difficult to wean off of for many.” (Beynon’s wife, the former head of engineering at Mindbloom, now works at DOGE.) Although ketamine doesn’t lead to the same kind of physical withdrawal symptoms as opioids or alcohol, Morgan, the University of Exeter professor, said its abuse potential is widely accepted, partly because people build a tolerance to the drug very quickly. In the United Kingdom, where health data are more centralized, more than 2,000 people sought treatment for ketamine addiction in 2023. More to the point, ketamine’s most dramatic risks depend on simply how much ketamine a person takes, and for how long.

Swaths of the tech world have long been drawn to Stoic philosophy, which encourages a detachment from that which is out of your control. Stoicism offers excellent coping strategies in the face of adversity—useful in an industry where most start-ups fail—but taken to extremes, it can also be a pathway to disengagement from the world and people around you. Ketamine, similarly, can afford its users space between themselves and overwhelming despair, which might help explain how it can treat depression, Mathai, the Miami psychiatrist, said. But there are consequences for leaning into that escape for too long.

For 35 years, amateur and professional cryptographers have tried to crack the code on Kryptos, a majestic sculpture that sits behind CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. In the 1990s, the CIA, NSA, and a Rand Corporation computer scientist independently came up with translations for three of the sculpture’s four panels of scrambled letters. But the final segment, known as K4, was encoded with knottier techniques and remains unsolved. This failure has only deepened the obsession of thousands of would-be cryptanalysts. When one of them thinks they have an answer, they write to Jim Sanborn for confirmation. Sanborn is the artist who created the installation and the only person who knows the answer. Lately the pace has picked up. And Sanborn is getting ticked off—though not for the reasons you might think.

Consider the email from one recent would-be codebreaker. “What took 35 years and even the NSA with all their resources could not do I was able to do in only 3 hours before I even had my morning coffee,” it began, before the writer showed Sanborn what they believed to be the cosmically elusive solution. “History’s rewritten,” wrote the submitter. “no errors 100% cracked.” You might ask, what enables someone to believe they’d outperformed the world’s most elite mathematicians and cryptologists, including some spooks who maybe have a quantum computer in the basement? The answer is pure 2025: a chatbot!

It turns out that the current generation of AI models is happy to accept prompts aimed at solving Kryptos, coming up with the decoded message in plaintext, and declaring victory. Sanborn says he’s seeing it more and more. Of course, this writer’s “solution” was dead wrong, like the thousands Sanborn had previously bounced.

Sanborn contacted me recently to express his disgust with this development. “It feels like a major shift,” he says. “The numbers [of submissions] have increased dramatically. And the character of the emails is different—the people that did their code crack with AI are totally convinced that they cracked Kryptos during breakfast! AI seems to be lying to them, telling every one of them that it's 99.99% sure that they cracked Kryptos, congratulations. So they all are very convinced that by the time they reach me, they've cracked it.”

This bothers Sanborn in several ways. Until recently there was an unspoken agreement between the artist and the Kryptos faithful that the effort to crack the code would be taken seriously. (Some years ago, Sanborn began charging $50 to review solutions, providing a speed bump to filter out wild guesses and nut cases.) That back-and-forth fed into the artistic nature of Kryptos; having an object that defies solution in the backyard of the CIA is a subversive commentary on the funhouse-mirror aspect of intelligence gathering, where every truth is cast into doubt. The fact that thousands of people have spent an enormous amount of effort to unveil the plaintext—which, judging from the decoded panels so far, indicates Sanborn’s message is a gloss on secrecy itself. Newcomers seem to have no sense of this complexity.

“The crowd of people trying to crack Kryptos today have no idea what Kryptos is,” says Sanborn. He finds himself sifting through emails from randos using AI shortcuts that require little thought and expertise, let alone appreciation for the challenge. It’s like saying you’ve scaled Everest by taking a helicopter ride to the summit—but worse, because these ankle-biters haven’t solved the code at all. They’ve barely climbed above sea level. Sometimes, in his replies, Sanborn doesn’t hold back. “I infer from your certainty that you used AI,” he told one misguided guesser. “AI lies, and does not have enough info.”

Sanborn, a climate-conscious friend of the Earth who lives on a small island on the Chesapeake Bay, is also appalled by the amount of energy that it takes to produce generative AI, and AI’s fabricated answers. Adding to the annoyance is that some of the would-be codebreakers are touting their collaboration with Grok 3, which is made by Elon Musk’s xAI. The same Musk who, despite good deeds with Tesla, now works for an administration determined to reverse any progress on mitigating climate change. “That’s a little twist of the ice pick,” he says.

Sanborn worries that as more people use AI, his inbox will become even more flooded with pretenders. He’s nearly 80 years old and has long moved on to other art projects. “If this thing does get out of control it could become unmanageable,” he says. He’s even considering putting a hold on his verification process for a while. “I haven't made a decision yet,” he says,

One decision he has made is to not give away the answer in his lifetime. “I would much prefer it to be a forever code,” he says, indicating that this artist will not come in from the cold. After he’s gone, it will be up to his wife. He once mused that at some point the best course would be to auction off the answer, with the money going to climate science. Ideally the winner would maintain the secret as he has. “Who knows how many years I have left?” he says. “It’s still somewhat nebulous.”

At times, surprised at the lack of progress, he has dropped clues to the solution, sharing “cribs”—plaintext translations of several words in the 97-character panel. In 2010 he provided the word BERLIN. Four years later he revealed that the next five characters translated to CLOCK. In 2020, he let us know that the plaintext in positions 26 through 34 was NORTHEAST. Soon after, responding to another failed solution, he mentioned that the four characters preceding that word spelled EAST. (“That was accidental,” says Sanborn. “I wasn’t going to do it but I sort of let it out of the bag.”) Cribs can act like skeleton keys to unlock a thorny message. Not this time. Though each hint generated frantic activity among the large community of wannabe solvers, K4 continues to defy them.

Meanwhile, Sanborn has to be careful about every statement he makes; during our conversation there were some seemingly innocuous questions he wouldn’t answer, in fear of unintentionally giving away another clue. “Tiny little things can be picked up, especially if it's in print and then used as one more nail in the coffin, so to speak,” he says. As for intentionally offering further clues, don’t hold your breath. “That’s it,” he says.

Clearly, despite the drain on Sanborn’s time and attention, he takes pride that his work remains relevant. You may need a security clearance or special permission to view Kryptos, but the invitation to solve it keeps the work perpetually alive, which is an artist’s dream. But then Sanborn checks his mail and sees this: “I’m just a vet,” someone writes. “Cracked it in days with Grok 3.” The answer wasn’t even close.