Tesla CEO Elon Musk returns to Joe Rogan Experience, but with less weed – CNET

Tesla CEO Elon Musk caused quite an uproar the last time he was a guest on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast when he fired up a sizable joint and proceeded to smoke it. This led to several investigations into Musk's government contracts and so on, as well as countless memes, avatars and at least one Schoolboy Q music video.

After all that, there was no way that Elon's handlers (can you think of a more difficult and thankless job than that? Other than motherhood, natch) would let him go back, right? Wrong! Elon's second JRE podcast episode went live on Thursday morning. So, what did we learn?

Well, this is a website about transportation, I'll try and limit things to Tesla-related topics, which means that — in short — we didn't get a whole lot. The biggest bit of news likely involves Elon's claims that out of Tesla's 7,000 Chinese (meaning employees in China) employees, none died during the coronavirus outbreak that was responsible for as many as 4,600 deaths.

How likely is it that Elon's correct here? Well, given that China reported a total of 82,885 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in a total national population of nearly 1.4 billion people — the odds are in his favor. Is that a reason to downplay the seriousness of the disease, as Musk and Rogan did during the interview? I certainly don't think so.

Next, we learned that the second coming of the Tesla Roadster would likely occur after the release of both Cybertruck and Semi. That's not terribly surprising, considering the popularity and relative affordability of Cybertruck vs. Roadster, and the fact that we've been waiting for Semi for three-ish years already, and it just got pushed back another year.

This is the new Tesla Roadster

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When asked for details on the Roadster, Musk politely declined to elaborate, stating that, "That's better left for a real product unveil, but with the Roadster, we''re going to do somethings that are unfair. People who have been waiting for the Roadster won't be disappointed."

Finally, we got a little peek behind the curtain of the notorious "steel ball incident" at the Cybetruck unveiling last year, where lead designer Franz Von Holzhausen broke the Cybertruck's "unbreakable" side glass. Well, the glass broke because — and this is according to Elon — the corner of the glass was likely damaged when Von Holzhausen hit the truck's door with a sledgehammer to demonstrate the toughness of its cold-rolled stainless steel body.

It's basically impossible for us to verify if that's actually the reason for the glass breaking, but hey, how often are you and your friends going to be taking sledgehammers and steel balls to your future Cybertrucks?