Elon Musk: Feds tested me for drugs after I smoked weed with Joe Rogan
Elon Musk’s marijuana-fueled interview session with podcaster Joe Rogan in 2018 prompted the federal government to test him and his space exploration company for drugs for a whole year, the Tesla mogul revealed.
Musk told the Nelk Boys and John Shahidi on the “Full Send” podcast on Thursday that he needed to prove to the government that he wasn’t an addict after taking “one puff” during his interview with Rogan four years ago.
“I did get a lot of backlash, because it’s still federally illegal,” the world’s richest human told “Full Send.”
The 2018 interview took place in Rogan’s studios based in Los Angeles. California had legalized recreational cannabis consumption in 2018.
“Space X has federal government contracts, so our competitors were like ‘Why aren’t you doing anything? Look at him brazenly smoking weed on Joe Rogan’s podcast’,” Musk said.
“They drug tested me for everything.”
The footage of Musk smoking marijuana briefly sent Tesla’s stock price falling by as much as 9%, bringing the value of the company down by billions of dollars.
The steep stock fall forced Musk to reassure investors that he was not an addict, he said.
Musk’s space exploration company, SpaceX, won a $2.9 billion contract from NASA to build a lunar lander that would ferry astronauts to the moon.
Musk also revealed during Thursday’s podcast interview that he moved into a “very small” three-bedroom home worth $45,000 in Boca Chica, Texas — where SpaceX maintains its launch site.
He said the home is a 900 square foot abode that was “technically a three-bedroom but it used to be a two-bedroom” until he converted the garage. Musk added that he doesn’t have a “main residence”.
“My friends come and stay and they can’t believe” that he lives there, he said.
It was earlier reported by Insider that Musk lived in a prefab tiny home in Boca Chica. The $50,000-a-piece unit, which was built by Boxable, measures 375 square feet.
According to Forbes, Musk has a net worth of $273.6 billion.
During the podcast, Musk also revealed that he was “fairly nocturnal” and that he slept six hours each day.
Musk, who juggles his CEO duties at Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, and The Boring Company, said he normally goes to bed at around 3 a.m. and wakes up at 9 or 9:30 a.m.
Musk admitted that he had a “bad habit” of checking his phone immediately upon waking in order to make sure that no “emergencies happen overnight.”
Musk said that running companies meant that “there’s usually some kind of thing that’s happened overnight.”
Despite his usual busy schedule, Musk agreed to buy Twitter and take it private for $44 billion earlier this year — only to back out of the deal over a dispute about spam and bot accounts.
Twitter sued Musk in a Delaware court in a bid to enforce the terms of the buyout. A trial is scheduled for this fall.
