Elon Musk’s 100-Hour Weeks and the Smart Drug Slippery Slope
I wrote a related article about Tesla’s shady business practices
Elon Musk has never shied away from pushing boundaries — in technology and in his own mind. Behind the scenes, the world’s richest man reportedly turned to cognitive enhancers and mood-altering drugs to maintain his edge. Over the past year, Musk’s regimen allegedly included near-daily ketamine doses mixed with other substances — so much that he even traveled with a “daily medication box” holding about 20 pills, from Adderall to ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms. Musk may have seen these pills as tools to sharpen focus and lift his mood; yet as he chased a cognitive edge through chemistry, subtle cracks in his famed decisiveness began to show.
As Musk juggled his business empire with a political role, his public behavior grew erratic. The once laser-focused innovator veered into impulsivity: at one point he inexplicably swapped Twitter’s blue bird logo for the Dogecoin shiba inu without explanation – a whimsical stunt that baffled observers. In other moments, Musk’s usually crisp speech devolved into jumbled tangents. Some insiders quietly questioned whether the very chemical boosts meant to sharpen his intellect were instead clouding it.
Now Musk’s private life is feeling the fallout too. The New York Times reported that his intensified drug use has cast a shadow over a custody battle with musician Grimes (Claire Boucher), who has voiced concerns about his lifestyle’s impact on their children. Musk’s trajectory is a cautionary tale. He is perhaps the highest-profile entrepreneur to embrace “nootropics” — drugs meant to boost brainpower or mood — only to find that the quest for a cognitive edge can exact a cost. His story sets the stage for a broader reckoning with a culture fixated on cognitive enhancement, begging the question of how far the pursuit of mental optimization can be pushed before it pushes back.
Silicon Valley’s Cognitive Craze
In the tech world, nootropics have quietly become the worst-kept secret. In startup offices and coding bootcamps, talk of “microdosing” LSD or optimizing a daily supplement “stack” is almost as casual as discussing the latest app launch. Entrepreneurs swap stories about their brain-boosting regimens, and online forums brim with self-described biohackers trading tips on the newest focus-enhancing pill. What was once a fringe experiment is edging into the mainstream. One global survey of readers of the journal Nature found nearly one in five had taken prescription drugs like modafinil or Adderall off-label to improve concentration. Among college students, studies report that anywhere from 5% to as much as 35% have experimented with “study drugs” to get through exams. And it’s not just students – a 2015 poll of 5,000 German workers revealed 6.7% were using cognitive enhancers to boost performance or cope with stress, up from 4.7% a few years prior. In other words, the smart drug phenomenon has spilled out of the lab and into everyday life.
Real-life anecdotes illustrate how normal this has become among high achievers. Take 30-year-old entrepreneur Erin Finnegan, who credits a daily nootropic pill with helping her juggle a bicoastal business and frenetic travel schedule. “I would not give them up willingly,” she said of her brain supplements, noting that without them she’d have to scale back her jam-packed agenda. On the West Coast, self-proclaimed biohacker Megan Klimen admitted that on a stressful day she might swallow eight to ten different nootropic pills to stay sharp. And Eric Matzner, founder of a supplements startup, has gone even further – he says he takes over 40 capsules a day in his quest for a mental edge.
Shelves of supplement bottles and assembly lines of capsules are now part of Silicon Valley’s landscape. Startups have sprung up to manufacture “smart drug” pills in bulk, feeding a growing demand from those seeking any advantage they can get. The very term “nootropic” – once obscure medical jargon – has entered everyday conversation among coders and CEOs alike. The brain-hacking boom is bolstered by venture capital and tech optimism, with companies selling slickly branded pills that claim to boost “clarity, energy and flow” or enhance “memory, stamina and resilience”. In San Francisco co-working spaces, it’s not unheard of for a team of engineers to start the morning by collectively downing a dose of modafinil instead of espresso. Even talk of microdosing has moved from whispers to TED Talks – some startup founders openly discuss taking tiny hits of LSD or psilocybin mushrooms to spark creativity during the workday. In an environment where everyone is chasing an edge, a culture of cognitive enhancement has taken root, largely unchecked.
From Boost to Crutch
For all the hype, even true believers sometimes glimpse the dark side. Venture capitalist Chris Sacca, for instance, has admitted he once tried nootropics to power through a 48-hour coding marathon – only to end up with “a headache” and “lack of recall” once the buzz wore off. “I’m worried about the long term consequences,” Sacca remarked, echoing a quiet anxiety that underlies the smart drug craze. His experience captures a key point: what goes up must come down. The initial rush of artificial clarity often leaves a harsh comedown in its wake – pounding temples, crashing energy, foggy memory. And that’s just the immediate fallout.
Over time, what begins as an occasional brain boost can become a daily crutch. It’s easy to justify at first: take a prescribed ADHD pill like Adderall “just this once” to ace a big exam, or swallow a modafinil tablet to power through a product launch after a sleepless night. The immediate payoff – laser focus, boundless energy, the feeling of being “in the zone” – can indeed feel like a superpower. But reliance creeps in quietly. A student who pops a study drug for finals may find they can’t concentrate for ordinary homework without it. A young engineer who only intended to use modafinil during crunch time might start reaching for it every morning, until the idea of coding without chemical help triggers anxiety. The boost, in other words, can transform into a baseline expectation.
Meanwhile, the human body and brain may start to rebel. Stimulant-based nootropics like Adderall or Ritalin flood the system with dopamine and adrenaline, which can disrupt sleep, jack up heart rate and blood pressure, and suppress appetite. Many users experience a “crash” – a wave of exhaustion, irritability or mental fog – as the drug wears off. To avoid the crash and keep the high going, some end up increasing their dosage or combining multiple substances, a risky practice that can amplify side effects. Tolerance can build over time, meaning users need more of the drug to get the same effect, edging into addiction territory. Even supposedly gentler over-the-counter supplements or herbal nootropics carry uncertainties. They may interact in unpredictable ways when mixed into the elaborate pill stacks favored by hardcore biohackers. The online communities where nootropic enthusiasts swap tips also harbor cautionary tales: jittery nerves that no amount of meditation could calm, bouts of insomnia from overclocking one’s brain, or a creeping sense of depersonalization after relying on pills for every mental push.
Crucially, there is little long-term research on what happens when healthy people habitually tinker with their neurochemistry. The brain isn’t a simple machine that can be turbocharged without trade-offs. Some neuroscientists warn that prolonged use of cognitive enhancers could interfere with the brain’s natural plasticity – its ability to learn, adapt, and rebalance itself. A National Institutes of Health-funded review, for example, found that stimulants like modafinil and methylphenidate (the active ingredient in Ritalin) might boost performance in the moment but potentially at the cost of long-term brain adaptability. Young people are thought to be especially vulnerable, since the brain is still developing into the late twenties. In short, the “smart drug” may hand you a short-term advantage while quietly charging you a price that only becomes apparent later.
Blurring the Ethical Lines
Beyond health concerns, nootropics raise thorny ethical questions. In some circles, using a cognitive enhancer isn’t seen as illicit at all – it’s just a modern tool for self-improvement, not much different from drinking coffee or taking vitamins. In a survey at Ivy League colleges, one-third of students said that taking prescription stimulants to study did not count as cheating. Their argument: if a pill helps you perform at your best, why not use it, especially when competition for grades and jobs is fierce? This mindset is increasingly common among go-getters who view the brain as the next frontier for optimization.
Nevertheless, the fairness issue looms large. After all, in sports, we ban performance-enhancing drugs to keep competition fair and protect athletes’ health. Should workplaces and universities likewise worry about a level playing field when some participants are chemically turbocharged? Duke University has already drawn a line: its honor code now explicitly classifies the unauthorized use of prescription meds for academic performance as a form of cheating. Enforcing such a policy is another matter – there are no drug tests before exams – but the very existence of that rule shows growing concern that brain doping muddies the ideals of meritocracy.
There’s also the question of pressure and consent. In high-octane environments like investment banks or elite engineering firms, if your colleagues are quietly popping Provigil (modafinil) to sustain 14-hour workdays, you might feel you have to do the same just to keep up. What begins as a personal choice could evolve into an unspoken job requirement. This “arms race” mentality means those who opt out of enhancement might risk falling behind, effectively penalized for staying natural. In Silicon Valley, where the ethos has long been to maximize productivity and “be your best self,” some worry that cognitive enhancers are creating a culture where normal alertness and creativity are never enough. The bar for productivity keeps rising, and with it comes a subtle expectation that serious contenders will pharmacologically upgrade themselves. It’s a self-reinforcing loop: as more people normalize nootropic use, others feel pressure to join in, and the collective standard of what a “hard-working person” looks like shifts further into superhuman territory.
Society hasn’t really caught up with these dilemmas. Is taking a focus-boosting pill fundamentally different from drinking a triple espresso or using a smartphone app to organize your life? Where do we draw the line between acceptable self-improvement and unfair advantage? So far, there are more questions than answers. What’s clear is that the rise of smart drugs is forcing us to confront what we value more – the purity of effort or the results obtained. As nootropics inch toward mainstream acceptability, we may soon face decisions about whether to regulate their use in schools and workplaces, or conversely, whether to accept a future where a bit of cognitive doping is just part of the competitive landscape.
Conclusion: No Free Lunch for the Brain
Ultimately, the lure of nootropics speaks to an age-old desire: to transcend our natural limits. The idea of shaving away sleep, turbocharging our intellect, and squeezing more output from every day is undeniably tempting – especially in a world that celebrates relentless hustle, where figures like Elon Musk set almost superhuman examples. But there’s no such thing as a free upgrade for the human brain. Every shortcut has a cost, whether it’s to our health, our psyche, or our sense of fair play. The slippery slope of chasing ever-higher performance can lead to a point of diminishing returns, or worse, a point of harm.
In pop culture, the film Limitless imagined a miracle pill that unlocks genius with zero downsides. Reality is more complicated. For every success story of someone who claims “smart drugs” changed their life, there’s a cautionary tale of burnout, dependency, or lost perspective. High performers who have flirted with these enhancers often come to realize that more productivity doesn’t always equate to better well-being. The human brain evolved with a need for rest, reflection, and balance – things no pill can replace.
As Elon Musk’s own experience shows, even the most driven individuals eventually hit a wall where pushing harder ceases to be productive. The rise of nootropics invites us to consider where we’re headed as a society. Do we really want a future where success requires pharmacological assistance just to stay in the race? Perhaps the true key to sustainable high performance isn’t found in a capsule, but in respecting the brain’s natural rhythms. In the end, the smartest way to get ahead may be acknowledging that our minds, remarkable as they are, have limits – and that’s okay. After all, innovation and insight often come not from a sleepless, drug-fueled blur, but from a well-rested mind allowed to wander and wonder. And no pill can substitute for that kind of organic, human brilliance.
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