We'd Like to See the Chain of Custody on Elon Musk's Pee After the Drug Allegations

As the fallout from reports of Elon Musk's alleged drug use continues, one columnist has made a very salient point: that there may well be someone whose job it is to collect the boss's piss. In a Bloomberg op ed , former Goldman Sachs banker and current "Dealbreaker" editor Matt Levine recounted one of the more easily overlooked points of this bizarre plot: that Musk is, per his attorney and his own prior recollections, subjected to random drug tests.

That would seem to mean that there's an employee or group of employees responsible for collecting the urine to be tested. "Imagine," the columnist muses, "being the SpaceX employee in charge of randomly drug testing Elon Musk." "Tiptoe into Musk’s office after his night out not getting into Berghain and say 'hey Mr.

Musk it’s time for your random drug test, here’s a cup,'" Levine continues. "What if he says no? What if he hands you back the cup and it is just full of cocaine? What are you going to do about it? You work for him and he is not, like, a chill and understanding guy." Levine went on to point out that Tesla also has anti drug policies as well, which could indicate, theoretically at least, that there's also someone who's supposed to collect urine samples from the man himself at that company as well.

Though he doesn't continue down the train of thought, the columnist's yellow hued thought experiment would logistically entail a chain of custody for the billionaire's pee, but because we're not government piss test experts we don't know who would receive that liquid nuclear football between the sample first being expelled and it ending up in a contractor's lab somewhere.

As with many Muskian gambits, we're left with more questions than answers. Does the urine get passed off to a courier who takes it to a federal office and have it shipped to NASA headquarters in DC, or does it get sent to CalTech's Jet Propulsion Lab, which NASA co funds, because that's closer? Would there need to be another courier to pick it up, and who would check in the precious cargo after that? And the glaring, number one question: how do we know it's really Musk's urine that ultimately ends up in the lab? In his famously tyranical work environments, isn't it conceivable that he's simply providing someone else's micturition, which indeed tests clean even if he has been doing drugs? It's gross, but because of Musk's immense government contracts, it's also a billion dollar question.

Between the government and SpaceX, it's hard to tell which is the more secretive and least likely to respond to sensitive media queries of any nature, much less one regarding pee. Nevertheless, we've reached out to both to ask for "any information about how samples are taken, transported, and tested," and will definitely update this story if someone deigns to provide us with a response.

More on pee: Scientists Have Been Studying Your Pee and They Finally Have Answers.