Elon Musk on Joe Rogan in 2018: What the Interview Covered

First published September 12, 2018.

Epic Interview: Elon Musk Smoking A Joint With Joe Rogan

Elon Musk's first appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience, episode #1169, was released on 6 September 2018 and ran for about two and a half hours. Most people remember a few seconds of it: Musk taking a single puff from a joint, a mix of tobacco and cannabis, that Rogan offered him in the studio. The rest of the conversation was a long, wandering talk about artificial intelligence, tunnels, electric cars, rockets and what it is actually like to run several companies at once. The episode is embedded below in full.

Here is what the interview covered, why the cannabis moment caused such a stir, and what followed for Musk and his companies.

The setting: a hard year for Musk

The interview landed at an unusually tense moment. In 2018 Tesla was struggling to ramp up production of the Model 3, and Musk had described sleeping at the factory to fix problems on the line. In August he had tweeted that he had "funding secured" to take Tesla private at $420 a share, a claim that would lead, at the end of September, to a US Securities and Exchange Commission lawsuit and a settlement that removed him as Tesla's chairman for three years. Questions about his workload and wellbeing were all over the business press.

So when one of the world's most watched podcasters invited him for a loose, unscripted chat, viewers were looking for clues about how he was really doing.

What they talked about

Rogan opened with Musk's sheer range of projects, starting with The Boring Company, which planned to dig tunnels under Los Angeles as a way around road congestion. Rogan wondered aloud, with his usual profanity, how one person found the time and ideas for all of it. Musk's answers were mostly low-key, and he came across as a man who simply could not stop thinking about engineering problems.

From there the conversation moved through a long list of subjects, among them:

Artificial intelligence. Musk repeated his long-standing warning that advanced AI could be dangerous and said he had tried, without much success, to persuade people to regulate it. Merging humans with computers, he suggested, might be the best option: "if you can't beat it, join it."
Brain–computer interfaces. He described the goal of Neuralink, his company working on implants that link the brain directly to computers.
The Boring Company's novelty products, including the "Not a Flamethrower" torches it sold to fans earlier that year.
Future transport, such as his idea for an electric jet that could take off vertically.
Life and work, including his habits, social media and why he kept taking on so much.

Much of it was speculative, the kind of thinking out loud that suits a podcast. None of it amounted to a product announcement or a firm timetable.

"What keeps you up at night?"

One of the more revealing moments came when Rogan asked what kept Musk awake. Musk did not talk about AI or Mars. He talked about cars. He said that SpaceX, his rocket company founded in 2002, was hard work, but that a car business was harder still: "it is very difficult to keep a car company alive."

That remark was about Tesla, not SpaceX. Car making has thin margins, huge factory costs and fierce competition, and very few new American carmakers had lasted long in the previous century. Coming in the middle of Tesla's production crisis, the comment was a rare plain admission of how close to the edge the company had felt.

(The video originally embedded here is no longer available on YouTube.)

The joint that made headlines

Late in the conversation Rogan lit what he explained was a joint of tobacco and marijuana. Musk checked what it was, asked whether it was legal there, took a puff and handed it back, describing himself as not a regular cannabis smoker. Recreational cannabis was legal for adults in California, where the show was recorded, so nothing about it broke state law.

The clip still spread worldwide within hours. The next day Tesla shares fell about 7 percent at the open, a drop that also reflected news, released the same day, that chief accounting officer Dave Morton had resigned after only a month in the job. Commentators argued over whether the chief executive of a public company should be seen smoking anything on camera, while many fans simply enjoyed the moment.

What happened next

The episode had consequences beyond the stock price. Fox Business and CNBC soon reported that the US Air Force was looking into Musk's security clearance, which he held because SpaceX launches government and military payloads, although an Air Force spokesperson called those reports inaccurate. In November 2018 NASA announced a safety and workplace-culture review of SpaceX and Boeing, the two companies building spacecraft to carry its astronauts, and officials quoted by The Washington Post said it was largely prompted by the podcast. NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said he had a lot of confidence in the SpaceX team, and SpaceX went on to fly NASA astronauts to the International Space Station in 2020.

In later interviews Musk reportedly played the moment down, remarking that cannabis is not much help for productivity. He has returned to Rogan's show several times since, and the 2018 episode remains one of the best known in the podcast's history.

Why the interview is still worth watching

If you only know the meme, the full conversation is a useful snapshot of how Musk talked about his ambitions in 2018, before Twitter, before his political turn and before Tesla became one of the most valuable carmakers in the world. Some predictions aged well, others did not, and that is part of the interest. Watch it as a record of what he believed and worried about at that time, not as evidence of what later happened at his companies.

The full episode, as published on the show's YouTube channel: