From sending WTF emails to employees, dating celebs and waging war against AI to creating electric cars and plans to colonize Mars, Elon Musk’s personality has won him fans while his flamboyance has landed him in trouble with investors. Yet, there’s no stopping Musk from being, well, himself, and his personality was on full display in a recent interview during which Musk smoked weed, sipped whiskey and talked about innovations and events that could alter the course of humanity.
In a candid conversation that lasted over two and a half hours on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, Musk discussed about early plans regarding Tesla’s electric cars, the urgent need to shift towards sustainable energy, electric planes and a lot more.
The podcast started with Musk discussing how running Tesla was his ‘hardest’ job yet and how difficult it is to sustain a car company, especially one which is on the cusp of a breakthrough trend that is yet to go mainstream. The conversation then turned interesting when Rogan asked him about electric planes and whether the idea had crossed his mind, to which Musk said:
I’ve thought about this quite a lot, quite a lot. The trick is that you have to transition to level flight. The thing you’d use for vertical takeoff and landing is not suitable for high-speed flight.
Musk then described his vision of an electric vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) aircraft and how it would work, but later added that ‘the electric airplane isn’t necessary right now’. He argued that electric cars, solar energy and stationary storage of energy are the more important things he has on his mind currently.
The conversation then shifted towards the adoption of sustainable energy and the need to ditch fossil fuels for good, a topic which made Musk visibly emotional. “We’re really playing a crazy game here with the atmosphere and the oceans. We’re taking vast amounts of carbon from deep underground and putting this, putting this in the atmosphere, this is crazy. We should not do this. It’s very dangerous. We should accelerate the transition to sustainable energy. I mean the bizarre thing is that obviously, we’re going to run out of oil in the long-term”.
I don’t think you would necessarily want to be me. I don’t think people would like it that much.
Later on, Rogan lit a joint, which Musk puffed after asking whether it was legal, and then downed some whiskey. This is when the interview took a weird turn. Musk expressed that weed is not good for productivity, apparently alluding to his strenuous work at Tesla where employees are increasingly finding him asleep under a table and visibly exhausted due to sleep deprivation. He also talked about the ‘constant explosion of ideas’ in his head, and how the drive to become useful for others keeps him going. Whatever gets you high, Elon!
