White House chief of staff Susie Wiles on Tuesday told the New York Times that she did not say Elon Musk was “an avowed ketamine” user during a series of interviews with Vanity Fair.

“That’s ridiculous,” Wiles told the Times. “I wouldn’t have said it and I wouldn’t know.”

But Chris Whipple, who conducted the interviews and wrote the two-part profile, provided the Times with a recording in which she could be heard making that statement.

“The challenge with Elon is keeping up with him,” Wiles told Whipple. “He’s an avowed ketamine [user]. And he sleeps in a sleeping bag in the EOB [Executive Office Building] in the daytime. And he’s an odd, odd duck, as I think geniuses are. You know, it’s not helpful, but he is his own person.”

During their interviews, Whipple also asked Wiles for her thoughts on Musk sharing an X post that falsely claimed Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong were not responsible for the deaths of millions of people.

“I think that’s when he’s microdosing,” Wiles said, though she added that she did not have “first-hand knowledge.”

In a separate statement posted Tuesday amid the fallout from the Vanity Fair story, Wiles said that the “article published early this morning is a disingenuously framed hit piece on me and the finest President, White House staff, and Cabinet in history.”

“Significant context was disregarded and much of what I, and others, said about the team and the President was left out of the story,” Wiles said. “I assume, after reading it, that this was done to paint an overwhelmingly chaotic and negative narrative about the President and our team.”

As Wednesday afternoon, Musk had not commented on Wiles’ remarks to Vanity Fair.

The powerful tech billionaire and former head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has previously refuted reports that he uses ketamine, an anesthetic with approved medical uses that has become a popular recreational drug due to its dissociative effects.

In response to a New York Times story published in May detailing his alleged use of ketamine, Musk said the paper was “lying their ass off.”

“I tried *prescription* ketamine a few years ago and said so on X, so this not even news,” Musk said in a post on X on May 31. “It helps for getting out of dark mental holes, but haven’t taken it since then.”

“Also, to be clear, I am NOT taking drugs!” Musk said.