Lambert here: I’m not sure I’ve excerpted this correctly. The story is a William Gibson-like rat’s nest of personal connections/corrupt dealings between druggie squillionaires and their toadies. The basic idea seems to be that a Gracias drug firm was seeking FDA approval for a psychedelic at the same time the FDA had been infested by DOGE operatives. They would, of course. Did they? Still, the story is rich with human possibilities! Worth reading in full to understand the world these people live in. It seems that “Are you high?” should be the first question asked in any interview with a Silicon Valley oligarch, not that this will happen, of course.
Months before Antonio Gracias took a leading role in the dismantling of the federal government by the “department of government efficiency” (Doge), he was at Burning Man.
In the dusty Nevada desert, Gracias, a billionaire private equity investor and one of Elon Musk’s closest friends, attended Nova Heaven, a sunrise rave tribute to victims of the Hamas-led 7 October terrorist attack, and found himself dancing next to Rick Doblin – the US’s most prominent advocate for psychedelic drugs.
As hundreds of burners shuffled their sandy feet to psytrance music, Gracias started up a conversation. He had a piece of business advice.
Weeks after their dancefloor meeting, Doblin reached out to Gracias with a proposition. The investors and board of Lykos were not going to let the company go bankrupt [after the FDA refused to approve one of their drugs]. Would Gracias consider launching a takeover bid and seizing operational control?
As they corresponded about a potential plan, Doblin put Gracias in contact with the British hedge fund billionaire Christopher Hohn. By January, just before Gracias joined Doge, Gracias and Hohn were working on a takeover of Lykos.
At the end of May, Lykos confirmed in a brief statement on its website that foundations owned by Gracias and Hohn had led a $50m Series B funding round that recapitalized the business. The sparse post included few details of the deal, and years of previous news releases from Lykos no longer appeared on the company’s website. In the following weeks, Lykos appointed a new CEO and chief medical officer and remade the board of directors. Gracias and Hohn are now in control of the most prominent MDMA therapy company in the US. Gracias, Doblin said, is taking a hands-on role in its operations.
“It was the magic of Burning Man.”“It was the magic of Burning Man,” Doblin said. “I was sort of looking for a white knight that would come in and would be more focused on healing and on public benefit.”
Lambert here: Is Lykos then a public benefit corporation?
The takeover also highlights the ethical questions posed by Doge, even as its prominent leader, Musk, has left the government. Doge staffers like Gracias have received unprecedented access to US agencies, including their processes and staff. There have been few guardrails on their work, or the ways they leverage that access in their non-governmental lives. Just a few months ago, it was hard to imagine that an active government employee at an agency embedded across the government would assume control over a pharmaceutical company seeking FDA approval.
“[Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (Maps)] and Gracias are going to try to seize the moment that we’re in,” said Ifetayo Harvey, a former Maps employee and executive director of the People of Color Psychedelic Collective. “I think the aim is to get MDMA-assisted psychotherapy approved by the FDA by any means necessary.”
Gracias’s time in government ended in July, after his presence at Doge caught the attention of the AFL-CIO, the nation’s largest federation of unions. An AFL-CIO report in June raised questions about Gracias’s fiduciary responsibilities as CEO of Valor as the private equity firm manages retirement plans for public employees such as teachers and municipal workers.
“We noted Antonio Gracias appeared to be moonlighting for Doge when he’s supposed to be running Valor for the benefit of those pension plans,” said Brandon Rees, deputy director of corporations and capital markets for the AFL-CIO.
The pension fund controversy highlighted the ethical gray areas that Doge created, as some of its top staffers chose to pull double duty between public and private work. While Doge claimed to function with transparency, it has made public only a partial explanation of how its staffers accessed and used government data, as well as how their work may have informed their own future business endeavors. Doge’s broad mandate to reshape federal agencies allowed it to operate akin to a parallel government with little oversight or disclosure about its activities, ethics watchdogs and labor groups allege, and created larger concerns about what might constitute conflicts of interest for its staffers.
“With the lack of transparency, it leaves us really grasping at what it even means to be Doge,” said Faith Williams, a policy director at the Project on Government Oversight, a non-profit watchdog group. “We have seen so many, if not outright conflicts of interest then potential for conflicts of interest, and if not outright corruption, potential for corruption.”
That hazy dynamic raises questions about Gracias’s new leadership of Lykos, according to ethics experts, and what it might mean for a former Doge member to now be seeking regulatory approval. Although Gracias worked primarily with the SSA, Doge’s staffers have also been embedded in the FDA and fired employees reviewing clinical trials for Musk’s Neuralink.
Government ethics rules generally prohibit federal employees from representing private enterprises to agencies while working in government. There are also rules limiting how former employees can represent private interests even after they have left the government, in an effort to prevent workers from trying to seek favor for a future regulatory decision.
“You can’t be greasing the wheels and then say, ‘OK, now I’m going to quit and go pursue that approval,’” said Cynthia Brown, senior ethics counsel at the non-profit watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.
Doblin denied that Gracias’s role at Doge posed any conflict of interest, saying that the billionaire did not work with the FDA. Lykos did not respond to questions related to Gracias’s work at Doge.
Lambert here: As of January 16, 2026: “MDMA Just Received Early But Limited FDA Approval” (publication date from Kagi search snippet).
Add new comment