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THIS IS EPIC: Elon Musk gives a rare glimpse into HOW HIS MIND WORKS

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A joint, a live mic, and $1.6 billion vanished from Tesla’s market cap in a single trading session.

On September 6, 2018, Elon Musk sat down with Joe Rogan for episode #1169 of The Joe Rogan Experience, a 2.5-hour, live-streamed conversation that wandered through artificial intelligence, human consciousness, electric aircraft, and colonizing Mars. About two hours in, Rogan lit a blunt mixing tobacco and marijuana, legal in California, and passed it across the desk. Musk took a single puff on camera, and the internet did the rest.

• Musk asked Rogan, “Is that a joint? Or is it a cigar?” before Rogan confirmed it was tobacco and weed, and Musk took one hit while sipping whiskey through the rest of the show.
• Tesla stock dropped as much as 9% to 10% intraday on the next trading day, September 7, 2018, compounded by the same-day departure of Chief Accounting Officer Dave Morton.
• In November 2018, NASA opened a safety and workplace culture review of SpaceX to check compliance with federal drug-free workplace rules tied to its government contracts.

The True Details of Couch Events

Nothing about the moment looked staged. Rogan, mid-conversation about the nature of reality, pulled out what he described as a joint and lit it. Musk hesitated just long enough to ask what it was, took the hit, exhaled, and kept talking. He wasn’t shy about downplaying it afterward, telling Rogan, “I almost never smoke weed,” and adding that it doesn’t do much for him. The whiskey stayed in his hand for most of the remaining runtime while the two dug into topics that ranged from Tesla’s Autopilot ambitions to whether electric planes were feasible.

Secular Talk host Kyle Kulinski’s breakdown zeroes in on the gap between the substance of what happened — a legal adult taking one puff of a legal substance on a podcast filmed in California — and the scale of the reaction it triggered. The segment treats the stock swing and the NASA review as evidence of just how disproportionate the fallout was relative to the actual act.

“I almost never smoke weed,” Musk told Rogan, noting it barely affected him at all.

Wall Street’s Overnight Reaction

The market didn’t wait for nuance. When trading opened on September 7, Tesla shares fell as much as 9% to 10% intraday, a drop that coincided with news that Chief Accounting Officer Dave Morton had resigned after less than a month on the job. Analysts and financial press spent the following days trying to untangle how much of the sell-off was driven by the accounting exit versus the optics of the CEO smoking on a livestream watched by millions. The two events landed on the same day, and investors treated them as a single signal about instability at the top of the company.

For a company already fielding questions about production targets on the Model 3 and Musk’s unpredictable public behavior, the timing made the moment stick. It wasn’t just a viral clip — it moved real money, and it gave critics of Musk’s management style a concrete data point to point to.

NASA Gets Involved

The fallout didn’t stop with Tesla’s stock price. Because SpaceX holds federal government contracts, it’s bound by drug-free workplace requirements, and in November 2018 NASA opened a broader safety and workplace culture review of the company that specifically weighed compliance with those rules. The review folded in questions well beyond the Rogan appearance itself, but the joint on the podcast was the spark that got NASA looking. For a company Musk had built around launching astronauts, having a federal safety review triggered by a talk-show puff was its own kind of absurd escalation.

The Overreaction Angle

Secular Talk’s commentary leans hard into the disconnect: an adult smoking a legal drug in a legal state on a long-form interview format shouldn’t, on its face, be a market-moving or a NASA-triggering event. The show frames the stock dip and the federal review as proof that public perception, not the actual conduct, was driving consequences that reached into boardrooms and government offices. Whether or not Musk’s judgment in front of a live camera was smart optics for a public company CEO, the response — measured in billions of dollars of market cap and a federal safety review — arguably outran the offense.

Musk’s Tesla has since become a fixture of the electric vehicle conversation on every front from stock volatility to product rollouts like solar panels on a Tesla, and long-form interview platforms like Rogan’s have kept pulling in outsized figures from tech and beyond, the same way shows covered in InfoSearched’s interviews and interesting news coverage tend to draw scrutiny once a clip escapes the full broadcast.

Tesla’s stock eventually recovered well past its pre-September 2018 levels, but the joint clip never stopped circulating, and it remains the single image most people associate with that entire Rogan appearance — more than anything either man said about Mars or AI over those two and a half hours.