When Elon Musk smoked weed on Joe Rogan’s podcast in 2018, there was a general freakout. The media treated it as if Musk had done something naughty, even though pot was already legal in California by then.
And they didn’t focus much on the fact that Musk also drank whiskey during the 2-½-hour show, nor on the fact that he mucked about with a flamethrower and a samurai sword during the “interview.” He took one big hit of a spliff (weed mixed with tobacco) and suddenly he was “doing drugs.”
Hilariously, ABC7 in Los Angeles presented its self-serious report with the headline “Musk appears to smoke pot during interview; Tesla stock falls 9 percent,” as if it were possible that Musk had been faking the whole thing.
That stock dive, though, got to the heart of what most likely concerned most investors, and that has lately become a topic of national conversation as Musk has moved into a powerful position in the federal government: the man acted like a troubled tween throughout the show.
The episode amounted to a real-time case-study in arrested development on the part of both men. The conversation, though it touched on “issues,” like artificial intelligence, mostly came off like a couple of obnoxious 12-year-olds hanging out in a tree fort.
For many, the Rogan appearance was a revelation. Musk hadn’t been media-shy before that, exactly, but he hadn’t tended to do a ton of interviews or big public appearances. And when he did, he tended to be soft-spoken and to hew to what had until very recently been basic social conventions (though he was increasingly saying troubling things).
While Musk fanboys loved the podcast as much as they would later convince themselves they loved the Cybertruck, many others were plotzed by how immature, awkward and vaguely creepy he seemed. His spliff-hit was, at most, one tiny part of what perplexed people: one of the richest men in the world, and the leader of two major companies (Tesla and SpaceX)—long presented by the media as a “visionary”—turned out to be an addled manchild.
And now, he’s wielding enormous powers as a top member of the Trump administration, in charge of (oy) “DOGE,” a basically made-up “department” in the federal government that’s supposedly dedicated to “cost-cutting,” but which seems mostly aimed at vindictively gutting big swaths of the government based on the whims, resentments and authoritarian ideologies of both Musk and Trump.
Still, on the Rogan show, and later, Musk said some stuff about both weed and drugs that seems interesting in light of subsequent events, revelations and rampant speculation over whether he might be abusing hard drugs, especially ketamine.
The speculation isn’t surprising given Musk’s increasingly bizarre public behavior over the past several years. In 2023, the Wall Street Journal reported that Musk had “told people he microdoses ketamine for depression, and he also takes full doses of ketamine at parties, according to the people who have witnessed his drug use and others who have direct knowledge of it.”
Low doses of ketamine are a legit use for treatment of depression. Full doses at “parties” is not. He told Rogan that he had only rarely smoked weed, mainly because it’s “not very good for productivity.”
That Wall Street Journal story wasn’t just about Musk, but about how trendy drug use had become among Silicon Valley execs. Many of them use ketamine and psychedelics “as gateways to business breakthroughs,” as the Journal put it. That’s not exactly the stuff of Timothy Leary. It seems like maybe those guys don’t really understand the function of such drugs for recreation, for mind expansion or for treating mood disorders.
Given how terrible so many Silicon Valley companies have become lately—jamming the Internet with AI slop, sabotaging their core functions for no discernable reason, designing ridiculous, dangerous and unneeded products, etc.—maybe they should find different “gateways.” And if they just want “recreation,” may I suggest they just smoke a joint now and again?
