Tesla (TSLA) shares were lower in early trading, following a report from the Wall Street Journal claiming executives at both Tesla and SpaceX are concerned about Elon Musk’s illegal drug use. Musk denied the report, saying he is subjected to random drug testing by NASA. Yahoo Finance’s Seana Smith and Brad Smith weigh in on what the report means for shareholders. For more expert insight and the latest market action, click here to watch this full episode of Yahoo Finance Live. Editor's note: This article was written by Eyek Ntekim
He smoked pot live on camera. If he were actually getting random drug tests he would have failed instantly and had his clearance revoked. Because you can tell a clearance investigator that you murder hookers on the weekend after raw dogging them and nobody cares. But if you have ever even LOOKED AT the devil’s lettuce, you are a security threat.
The reality is that “random drug testing” for clearance purposes mostly boils down to if you piss off someone AND don’t have a supervisor who will tell their supervisors that you can’t come to the piss truck today because you are super awesome and that this is hurting national security.
I would expect that they started doing the drug tests because he smoked pot live on camera. I recall there was rather a kerfuffle about it at the time.
Anyone with a clearance (which would be required if you were the money mark for a rocket company because you were pissy that russia wouldn’t sell you an ICBM…) is eligible for random drug tests. That technically applies to random bureaucrats who do data entry. The Emerald Apartheid is not special in that regard.
Different orgs have different criteria for what triggers a “random drug test”. None are actually random and it is always funny when someone figures out what kind of paperwork puts your name in the pool to go piss in front of somebody.
And, once you make it past the peon stage (or are someone’s kid), you have enough connections that you will never take one again.
To put it in context: I have a friend who gets “randomly selected” any time he lets one of his managers know he had a layover in DEN on a trip. And I know people who openly smoke “really skunky tobacco” on their lunch break who will never get called in.