Two years after famously smoking a blunt during a podcast with Joe Rogan, SpaceX and Tesla entrepreneur Elon Musk is back in the hot seat.
In 2018, Musk took what looked like his first-ever hit off a blunt during a live episode of The Joe Rogan Experience. The entrepreneur took a very brief puff and passed, and held off for the rest of the interview, but that one tiny hit kicked off a serious wave of controversy. This week, Musk returned for a new interview with Rogan, and managed to stir up more cannabis-related confusion.
When Rogan hosted Musk for that original blunt-puffing interview, he was based in California, where pot is legal. But last year, Rogan relocated to Texas, where adult-use weed is still entirely prohibited. While discussing the fallout from their previous interview, Rogan noted that it would be illegal for them to spark up at his new location, but added that CBD was at least legal in Texas.
Musk replied that he thought CBD was “fake” and overhyped. “CBD doesn’t do anything. Does it?” he asked Rogan, according to Marijuana Moment. “Well, no—no, it definitely does something for inflammation,” the podcaster replied, adding that “CBD works great for people with arthritis and people with sore muscles and things like that,” and that “it relieves anxiety for people.”
Rogan, who also just happens to be a vocal cannabis advocate, carried on with his effort to set Musk straight on the matter. CBD “helps people sleep, especially when it’s combined with things like melatonin,” he explained. “But it doesn’t get you high. People do mix CBD with THC for muscle creams though, and that doesn’t get you high either, but it increases the effectiveness.”
Still clueless on the matter, Musk said that using CBD products would make someone “smell like weed all day.” Rogan countered that most CBD products don’t smell like weed, although “some of it does… That’s the thing about anything that’s unregulated, right? Like hippies making it, that’s always the problem.”
Musk’s public dalliance with weed has gotten him in a lot of trouble. After hitting the blunt with Rogan back in 2018, Tesla’s Chief Accounting Officer Dave Morton resigned from the firm, and the company’s stocks dropped by six percent. Musk also infamously tweeted that he was going to list Tesla on the stock market at $420 a share, a claim that got him sued by the federal government. The suit was settled out of court, but only after Musk agreed to resign from Tesla’s board of directors.
The blunt-smoking incident also led NASA to conduct a $5 million dollar review to discover whether anyone at Musk’s SpaceX company was getting stoned on the job. This review, which was entirely funded with American taxpayers’ dollars, only verified the company’s existing anti-drug policy, but did prompt SpaceX to formally denounce its founder’s bad attempts at weed humor.
