Police Puzzled by 180 Kilos of SpaceX-Branded Cocaine Found at Crash Site

A single-engine plane crashed landed in a field of sugar cane in Brazil over the weekend, according to local news media Alagoas 24 Horas, killing the pilot and leaving behind 180 kilograms — or almost 400 pounds — of cocaine.

So far, it just sounds like a tale of drug smuggling gone awry. Except that the coke, stacked together in neat bricks and wrapped in plastic, as shown in a video from local police obtained by Alagoas, sported a distinctive label: the official SpaceX logo, in blue and white, giving the story a bizarre space-age twist.

The plane crash occurred in the coastal city of Coruripe on the Atlantic Ocean on Sunday afternoon, according to Alagoas. The deceased pilot was later identified as 46-year-old Timothy James Clark, an Australian businessman from Melbourne who seemed to have worked in the country’s mining industry and as a pilot.

Photos from police show the crumpled plane with a blue-colored tail lying upside down in a field of shattered sugarcane.  The craft was registered to the African nation of Zambia.

The case remains under investigation, local law enforcement told Alagoas. The street value of the detained coke is unknown, but according to one recent estimate, the stuff goes for around $1,500 per kilo in Latin America, meaning the plane could have easily been carrying a quarter million dollars in illicit cargo.

There’s little to indicate where the pilot was headed and why were the drugs branded with the SpaceX logo, but this isn’t the first time that a brand affiliated with Elon Musk, the SpaceX CEO, has been slapped on some illegal drugs.

A 2017 Forbes article highlighted how drug sellers were using tech company names, such as TripAdvisor and Skype, to brand illicit drugs to users. Musk’s electrical vehicle company Tesla was a prominent example, with pills of MDMA often being pressed into the shape of its logo.

“The appeal of high tech companies, who have already paid millions for the best graphic design available, as the image they want to be associated with their product is a natural fit,” Johnboy Davidson, a representative from ecstasy pill testing database Pill Reports, told Forbes at the time. “You may not be able to afford an actual Tesla but hey why not have the pill with that logo and you’ll feel just as good?”

We can imagine that the drug manufacturer for the marooned cocaine in Brazil wanted potential buyers to associate their product with SpaceX’s image (not to mention Musk’s reportedly worrisome drug use): bold, risk taking, and ready to send you into orbit like a SpaceX Dragon capsule.

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