Susie Wiles, President Donald Trump’s White House chief of staff, made a number of surprisingly candid remarks to a Vanity Fair reporter over the past year, according to two new articles published Tuesday. The articles cover everything from the Jan. 6 pardons to the Epstein files. But it’s her take on Elon Musk that may raise quite a few eyebrows in the world of tech—not for what Wiles said, but for the simple fact that she said it out loud to a journalist.
Wiles refers to Musk as “an avowed ketamine [user],” according to Vanity Fair in the first of two articles. In a follow-up interview, the New York Times asked Wiles about that quote and she denied saying it.
“That’s ridiculous,” Wiles said, according to the Times. “I wouldn’t have said it and I wouldn’t know.” But the Times says Vanity Fair played an audio recording of her saying it. Gizmodo has not heard the audio recording.
Musk has previously said he used small doses of ketamine to treat depression but has denied taking other forms of recreational drugs. The Wall Street Journal‘s reporting from early 2024 was the first time a large, reputable media outlet investigated the extent of Musk’s purported drug use. The Journal said Musk had used ketamine, LSD, cocaine, ecstasy, and psychedelic mushrooms dating back to at least 2018. And executives at Musk’s companies, like Tesla and SpaceX, were reportedly worried about it.
Back in May of this year, the New York Times published a report that said “Musk’s drug consumption went well beyond occasional use,” and he was taking so much it was “affecting his bladder, a known effect of chronic use.” The Times suggested that Musk’s drug use was one of the reasons he made a Nazi-style salute on Jan. 20, the day of Trump’s second inauguration, an assumption that seemed reasonable given his erratic jumping on stage that day. An appearance at CPAC the following month, complete with a chainsaw, had a similarly unhinged aesthetic.
Musk’s work as head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency put the billionaire in close proximity to Wiles, who also talked about the SpaceX CEO’s strange sleep patterns, saying “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.”
Trump’s chief of staff also seemed disturbed by Musk’s unilateral dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which was done as one of his first big acts of vandalism against the federal government. The way Wiles tells it, Musk was behind the effort and she insisted Trump “doesn’t know the details of these smallish agencies.”
Wiles suggested that she didn’t want to see USAID go, especially not in the haphazard way it was done, telling Vanity Fair, “no rational person could think the USAID process was a good one. Nobody.”
Vanity Fair reports that former president George W. Bush even got involved behind the scenes in order to save the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), a program Bush launched in 2003 and which depends on USAID grants. PEPFAR has prevented over 5 million babies from being born with HIV, according to the State Department’s own estimates from 2023.
Efforts to reach Musk through his companies were unsuccessful Tuesday. Gizmodo will update this article if we hear back.
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![Masochistic YouTuber Punishes Himself by Writing a First Person Shooter Entirely in COBOL
So: masochism. You might know that it takes its name from 19th-century Austrian nobleman and writer Leopold Ritter von Sacher-Masoch—and specifically from the content of his famous work, Venus in Furs, which catalogued the narrator’s submissive nature and fondness for experiencing pain and humiliation. Masoch himself was apparently not amused by the fact that his name became attached to such predilections—probably fair, given that the term was first used in a book entitled Psychopathia Sexualis, which also pioneered negging by speculating that Masoch himself “would have achieved real greatness had he been actuated by normally sexual feelings.” Happily, modern attitudes to the “S” part of BDSM are significantly more enlightened than they were in the 1880s and 1890s. In entirely unrelated news, a YouTuber by the name of icitry—whose bio on the site reads simply “try now, suffer later”—has written a whole first-person shooter in freaking COBOL. If you’ve never had to deal with COBOL, well, good for you, and you should probably keep it that way. The language is amongst the oldest computer languages, and was developed in the 1960s for managing business mainframes. It’s probably what drove poor Ginsberg in Mad Men out of his mind. COBOL remains in use today, largely in such legacy mainframes and other places where it’s not feasible to replace existing systems that, for all their foibles, still work.
One purpose for which it absolutely does not remain in use—and, in fact, has never been used—is programming first-person shooters. So why in the name of all that is good and holy would anyone do this to themselves? [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzpZQe7JT-o[/embed] In his video, icitry explains that the project started with him wondering, “What’s the dumbest but still technically possible language for writing a small FPS style game?” The answer was, yes, COBOL, and because the laws of the universe dictate that anything that can happen must happen, icitry got to work. Long, painstaking, tedious hours of work.
As he points out, COBOL is “old, verbose, missing most features even the shittiest modern languages have … and is definitely not created for game development.” All of this is true, although in fairness to COBOL, it was created at a time when people were still figuring out how programming should work and what a programming language should aim to be. Its earliest standard predated the idea of structured programming, although it soon attracted criticism from advocates of that concept— Edsger Dijkstra, in particular, famously hated the language and said its use “cripples the mind.” To modern eyes, just trying to parse a COBOL program is enough to induce a headache, let alone trying to write a game in it—but, miraculously, icitry manages to get his Wolfenstein 3D-esque project to work. He dodges COBOL’s complete lack of graphical functions by basically treating the game as what he calls a “frame generator”: his code computes the contents of each frame and uses a standard output function to write the results into a simple image format. This is rendered by ffplay—which, yes, is probably cheating, but not even old Leopold would try to write an entire graphics API from scratch in COBOL.
Elsewhere, icitry dodges COBOL’s lack of input management by using the console to input single characters to his game. He doesn’t so much dodge COBOL’s lack of any vector math functions—which are kind of important for a game where the entire gameplay loop revolves around calculating and manipulating 2D movement vectors—as he does just work around them by kinda writing them himself. And then, as if this wasn’t all enough self-punishment, he goes the extra mile by implementing DOOM engine functions like variable ceiling height. The whole project is a testament to mankind’s ingenuity, resourcefulness, and ability to withstand all manner of self-inflicted punishment. Watching the game run, you’d never guess it was written in a language so manifestly unsuited for the task at hand. Still! At least it’s not FORTRAN, right? Right?? *smash cut to an Austrian aristocrat at his desk with a copy of The Fortran Automatic Coding System for the IBM 704 and the DOOM source code* #Masochistic #YouTuber #Punishes #Writing #Person #Shooter #COBOLCOBOL,Doom,Wolfenstein 3D](https://i1.wp.com/gizmodo.com/app/uploads/2026/06/cobol-fps-1280x853.png?ssl=1 "Masochistic YouTuber Punishes Himself by Writing a First Person Shooter Entirely in COBOL
So: masochism. You might know that it takes its name from 19th-century Austrian nobleman and writer Leopold Ritter von Sacher-Masoch—and specifically from the content of his famous work, Venus in Furs, which catalogued the narrator’s submissive nature and fondness for experiencing pain and humiliation. Masoch himself was apparently not amused by the fact that his name became attached to such predilections—probably fair, given that the term was first used in a book entitled Psychopathia Sexualis, which also pioneered negging by speculating that Masoch himself “would have achieved real greatness had he been actuated by normally sexual feelings.” Happily, modern attitudes to the “S” part of BDSM are significantly more enlightened than they were in the 1880s and 1890s. In entirely unrelated news, a YouTuber by the name of icitry—whose bio on the site reads simply “try now, suffer later”—has written a whole first-person shooter in freaking COBOL. If you’ve never had to deal with COBOL, well, good for you, and you should probably keep it that way. The language is amongst the oldest computer languages, and was developed in the 1960s for managing business mainframes. It’s probably what drove poor Ginsberg in Mad Men out of his mind. COBOL remains in use today, largely in such legacy mainframes and other places where it’s not feasible to replace existing systems that, for all their foibles, still work.
One purpose for which it absolutely does not remain in use—and, in fact, has never been used—is programming first-person shooters. So why in the name of all that is good and holy would anyone do this to themselves? [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzpZQe7JT-o[/embed] In his video, icitry explains that the project started with him wondering, “What’s the dumbest but still technically possible language for writing a small FPS style game?” The answer was, yes, COBOL, and because the laws of the universe dictate that anything that can happen must happen, icitry got to work. Long, painstaking, tedious hours of work.
As he points out, COBOL is “old, verbose, missing most features even the shittiest modern languages have … and is definitely not created for game development.” All of this is true, although in fairness to COBOL, it was created at a time when people were still figuring out how programming should work and what a programming language should aim to be. Its earliest standard predated the idea of structured programming, although it soon attracted criticism from advocates of that concept— Edsger Dijkstra, in particular, famously hated the language and said its use “cripples the mind.” To modern eyes, just trying to parse a COBOL program is enough to induce a headache, let alone trying to write a game in it—but, miraculously, icitry manages to get his Wolfenstein 3D-esque project to work. He dodges COBOL’s complete lack of graphical functions by basically treating the game as what he calls a “frame generator”: his code computes the contents of each frame and uses a standard output function to write the results into a simple image format. This is rendered by ffplay—which, yes, is probably cheating, but not even old Leopold would try to write an entire graphics API from scratch in COBOL.
Elsewhere, icitry dodges COBOL’s lack of input management by using the console to input single characters to his game. He doesn’t so much dodge COBOL’s lack of any vector math functions—which are kind of important for a game where the entire gameplay loop revolves around calculating and manipulating 2D movement vectors—as he does just work around them by kinda writing them himself. And then, as if this wasn’t all enough self-punishment, he goes the extra mile by implementing DOOM engine functions like variable ceiling height. The whole project is a testament to mankind’s ingenuity, resourcefulness, and ability to withstand all manner of self-inflicted punishment. Watching the game run, you’d never guess it was written in a language so manifestly unsuited for the task at hand. Still! At least it’s not FORTRAN, right? Right?? *smash cut to an Austrian aristocrat at his desk with a copy of The Fortran Automatic Coding System for the IBM 704 and the DOOM source code* #Masochistic #YouTuber #Punishes #Writing #Person #Shooter #COBOLCOBOL,Doom,Wolfenstein 3D")
![Masochistic YouTuber Punishes Himself by Writing a First Person Shooter Entirely in COBOL
So: masochism. You might know that it takes its name from 19th-century Austrian nobleman and writer Leopold Ritter von Sacher-Masoch—and specifically from the content of his famous work, Venus in Furs, which catalogued the narrator’s submissive nature and fondness for experiencing pain and humiliation. Masoch himself was apparently not amused by the fact that his name became attached to such predilections—probably fair, given that the term was first used in a book entitled Psychopathia Sexualis, which also pioneered negging by speculating that Masoch himself “would have achieved real greatness had he been actuated by normally sexual feelings.” Happily, modern attitudes to the “S” part of BDSM are significantly more enlightened than they were in the 1880s and 1890s. In entirely unrelated news, a YouTuber by the name of icitry—whose bio on the site reads simply “try now, suffer later”—has written a whole first-person shooter in freaking COBOL. If you’ve never had to deal with COBOL, well, good for you, and you should probably keep it that way. The language is amongst the oldest computer languages, and was developed in the 1960s for managing business mainframes. It’s probably what drove poor Ginsberg in Mad Men out of his mind. COBOL remains in use today, largely in such legacy mainframes and other places where it’s not feasible to replace existing systems that, for all their foibles, still work.
One purpose for which it absolutely does not remain in use—and, in fact, has never been used—is programming first-person shooters. So why in the name of all that is good and holy would anyone do this to themselves? [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzpZQe7JT-o[/embed] In his video, icitry explains that the project started with him wondering, “What’s the dumbest but still technically possible language for writing a small FPS style game?” The answer was, yes, COBOL, and because the laws of the universe dictate that anything that can happen must happen, icitry got to work. Long, painstaking, tedious hours of work.
As he points out, COBOL is “old, verbose, missing most features even the shittiest modern languages have … and is definitely not created for game development.” All of this is true, although in fairness to COBOL, it was created at a time when people were still figuring out how programming should work and what a programming language should aim to be. Its earliest standard predated the idea of structured programming, although it soon attracted criticism from advocates of that concept— Edsger Dijkstra, in particular, famously hated the language and said its use “cripples the mind.” To modern eyes, just trying to parse a COBOL program is enough to induce a headache, let alone trying to write a game in it—but, miraculously, icitry manages to get his Wolfenstein 3D-esque project to work. He dodges COBOL’s complete lack of graphical functions by basically treating the game as what he calls a “frame generator”: his code computes the contents of each frame and uses a standard output function to write the results into a simple image format. This is rendered by ffplay—which, yes, is probably cheating, but not even old Leopold would try to write an entire graphics API from scratch in COBOL.
Elsewhere, icitry dodges COBOL’s lack of input management by using the console to input single characters to his game. He doesn’t so much dodge COBOL’s lack of any vector math functions—which are kind of important for a game where the entire gameplay loop revolves around calculating and manipulating 2D movement vectors—as he does just work around them by kinda writing them himself. And then, as if this wasn’t all enough self-punishment, he goes the extra mile by implementing DOOM engine functions like variable ceiling height. The whole project is a testament to mankind’s ingenuity, resourcefulness, and ability to withstand all manner of self-inflicted punishment. Watching the game run, you’d never guess it was written in a language so manifestly unsuited for the task at hand. Still! At least it’s not FORTRAN, right? Right?? *smash cut to an Austrian aristocrat at his desk with a copy of The Fortran Automatic Coding System for the IBM 704 and the DOOM source code* #Masochistic #YouTuber #Punishes #Writing #Person #Shooter #COBOLCOBOL,Doom,Wolfenstein 3D](https://gizmodo.com/app/uploads/2026/06/cobol-fps-1280x853.png "Masochistic YouTuber Punishes Himself by Writing a First Person Shooter Entirely in COBOL
So: masochism. You might know that it takes its name from 19th-century Austrian nobleman and writer Leopold Ritter von Sacher-Masoch—and specifically from the content of his famous work, Venus in Furs, which catalogued the narrator’s submissive nature and fondness for experiencing pain and humiliation. Masoch himself was apparently not amused by the fact that his name became attached to such predilections—probably fair, given that the term was first used in a book entitled Psychopathia Sexualis, which also pioneered negging by speculating that Masoch himself “would have achieved real greatness had he been actuated by normally sexual feelings.” Happily, modern attitudes to the “S” part of BDSM are significantly more enlightened than they were in the 1880s and 1890s. In entirely unrelated news, a YouTuber by the name of icitry—whose bio on the site reads simply “try now, suffer later”—has written a whole first-person shooter in freaking COBOL. If you’ve never had to deal with COBOL, well, good for you, and you should probably keep it that way. The language is amongst the oldest computer languages, and was developed in the 1960s for managing business mainframes. It’s probably what drove poor Ginsberg in Mad Men out of his mind. COBOL remains in use today, largely in such legacy mainframes and other places where it’s not feasible to replace existing systems that, for all their foibles, still work.
One purpose for which it absolutely does not remain in use—and, in fact, has never been used—is programming first-person shooters. So why in the name of all that is good and holy would anyone do this to themselves? [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzpZQe7JT-o[/embed] In his video, icitry explains that the project started with him wondering, “What’s the dumbest but still technically possible language for writing a small FPS style game?” The answer was, yes, COBOL, and because the laws of the universe dictate that anything that can happen must happen, icitry got to work. Long, painstaking, tedious hours of work.
As he points out, COBOL is “old, verbose, missing most features even the shittiest modern languages have … and is definitely not created for game development.” All of this is true, although in fairness to COBOL, it was created at a time when people were still figuring out how programming should work and what a programming language should aim to be. Its earliest standard predated the idea of structured programming, although it soon attracted criticism from advocates of that concept— Edsger Dijkstra, in particular, famously hated the language and said its use “cripples the mind.” To modern eyes, just trying to parse a COBOL program is enough to induce a headache, let alone trying to write a game in it—but, miraculously, icitry manages to get his Wolfenstein 3D-esque project to work. He dodges COBOL’s complete lack of graphical functions by basically treating the game as what he calls a “frame generator”: his code computes the contents of each frame and uses a standard output function to write the results into a simple image format. This is rendered by ffplay—which, yes, is probably cheating, but not even old Leopold would try to write an entire graphics API from scratch in COBOL.
Elsewhere, icitry dodges COBOL’s lack of input management by using the console to input single characters to his game. He doesn’t so much dodge COBOL’s lack of any vector math functions—which are kind of important for a game where the entire gameplay loop revolves around calculating and manipulating 2D movement vectors—as he does just work around them by kinda writing them himself. And then, as if this wasn’t all enough self-punishment, he goes the extra mile by implementing DOOM engine functions like variable ceiling height. The whole project is a testament to mankind’s ingenuity, resourcefulness, and ability to withstand all manner of self-inflicted punishment. Watching the game run, you’d never guess it was written in a language so manifestly unsuited for the task at hand. Still! At least it’s not FORTRAN, right? Right?? *smash cut to an Austrian aristocrat at his desk with a copy of The Fortran Automatic Coding System for the IBM 704 and the DOOM source code* #Masochistic #YouTuber #Punishes #Writing #Person #Shooter #COBOLCOBOL,Doom,Wolfenstein 3D")
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