How Joe Rogan became the world’s richest podcaster: As he lounges on a £480k-a-week yacht, TOM LEONARD reveals secrets behind former delivery man’s empire – and exactly how much he makes

A wise public figure would surely think twice these days before allowing themselves to be caught swanning around the Med on an ostentatious, fuel-guzzling, money-burning superyacht.

Especially if the celebrity in question is ‘man-of-the-people’ commentator and comedian Joe Rogan, who didn’t become the world’s most popular podcaster without developing a reputation for no-frills authenticity and relatability.

Certainly, there’s little chance his fans will ‘relate’ to the sight of their brawny hero and his family holidaying aboard the giant £40million yacht, OKTO.

The vessel – which at 218ft long is only 12ft shy of qualifying as a ‘mega-yacht’ – plus its crew of 16 costs £480,000 to charter for a week at this time of the year.

Rogan, 57, was seen boarding OKTO near Venice at the start of the week. A few days later, he was spotted throwing himself down the water slide as the yacht cruised off Croatia on the Adriatic.

There’s a huge infinity pool on the main deck, a Jacuzzi, cinema, gym, helipad and five state rooms for ten guests. Yet the only people seen on board have been Rogan, his wife Jessica Ditzel, a 49-year-old former cocktail waitress, and their two daughters, Lola, 17, and Rosy, 14.

It’s a surprising holiday choice for a man who likes to scoff at superyachts on his show. He has berated guests for downplaying climate change and criticised Bill Gates and other billionaires for flying to climate summits in private jets.

For the record, Joe, experts say superyachts are far more damaging to the environment than private jets.

The lavish Rogan family getaway provides a valuable insight not only into the private life of the martial arts fanatic but also into the extraordinary amount of money he earns.

Less than 16 years after Rogan and fellow comedian Brian Redban launched The Joe Rogan Experience as a rambling, cannabis-fuelled chat between two friends, the podcast now boasts 14million regular listeners. And chief among its roll call of guests has been Donald Trump, who appeared last October. The future President’s three-hour interview hit 20million YouTube views in its first 20 hours, and is seen as a major factor in his re-election.

The podcast is tirelessly controversial and hugely lucrative. In 2020, the music-streaming giant Spotify reportedly paid more than £150million for exclusive rights to the podcast for three-and-a-half years. The deal was renewed last year for an estimated £185million.

These are staggering sums for the outpourings of Rogan, whose CV includes spells as a sitcom actor, a martial arts instructor and a newspaper delivery man. The sums may seem shocking but leaked financial documents later revealed that, in its debut month, his podcast accounted for 4.5 per cent of all shows heard on the Spotify platform, with audiences spending some 14.9 million hours tuned in.

And the streaming deal counts for only a part of his fortune. According to online finance site Moneyzine, Rogan earns more than £105million a year in total, of which less than a quarter – some £45million – comes from Spotify. The rest includes £35million from podcast sponsors, £18million from live comedy shows and comedy for Netflix, £4million from YouTube advertising revenue, £1.5million from his stake in fitness brand Onnit and £1.5million from working as a commentator on martial arts contest Ultimate Fighting Championship.

Estimates of his net wealth hover around the £150million mark. He reportedly owns 15 properties worth £110million in total, four yachts and more than 20 cars.

In 2020, after complaining about the high taxes, overcrowding and restrictive Covid policies of California, Rogan moved his family to Austin, Texas, where they bought a £10million lakeside home. The 11,000sq ft property has its own bar, pool, gym, sauna and spa, as well as a studio where he records his podcast.

Rogan says he chose Texas primarily for the ‘freedom’, which also includes freedom to hunt. He’s an eat-what-you-kill aficionado, whose freezer is packed with the bears, elk and moose he’s bagged, often with bow and arrow.

Quite how Rogan has become an adored and trusted icon for a good chunk of the world’s young male population is a puzzle that even he struggles to explain.

Although his blokeish demeanour – bullet-headed, tattooed and muscle-bound – suggests a nightclub bouncer, Rogan is personable and relentlessly optimistic on his show, even if his opinions seem unfiltered. His easy-going interview manner and vast audience means few turn down his invitation and the result is a guest list both eclectic and impressive.

Guests have included Elon Musk, Bono, Mel Gibson, Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg, Left-wing firebrand senator Bernie Sanders, rapper Kanye West and US intelligence leaker Edward Snowden.

Rogan’s interviews, usually at least two hours long, often three, tend to sound like two people chatting in a bar, the conversation veering in all directions.

His audience, which is 70 per cent male and 64 per cent white, and evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats – loves it. ‘Cool conversations are a kind of mental nourishment,’ said Rogan after Spotify renewed its deal with him.

Critics, however, counter that these conversations are not remotely ‘cool’ when they allow dangerous misinformation to spread. Which, they add, happens rather too often given Rogan’s preference for speaking to ‘renegades’ whose views are starkly at odds with the mainstream.

Sceptics concede Rogan can be funny and astute: back in 2020, he presciently compared the prospect of a second Joe Biden presidency to ‘having a flashlight with a dying battery and going for a long hike in the woods’.

But they insist he doesn’t have the intellect to quiz many of his guests and too often allows them to get away with untruths that Rogan’s audience swallows blindly.

As for his own views, he insists he’s socially liberal on issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage.

He also has a strong libertarian streak when it comes to taxes, freedom of speech and gun rights.

He claims to be ignorant on many issues – but that doesn’t stop him having trenchant opinions on most of them.

Favourite Rogan themes are generally laddish: masculinity, physical and mental self-improvement, drugs (Rogan is a big fan and partaker of both cannabis and psychedelics) and wokeness – of which he’s definitely not a fan.

In 2021, Rogan caused a stir by claiming straight, white men had been silenced by ‘woke’ culture.

The drugs made headlines in 2018 when Elon Musk came on the podcast and, over the course of nearly three hours, the two men smoked weed and drank whisky.

Increasingly glassy-eyed, Musk brandished a Japanese sword and even a flamethrower. The following day, the share price of Tesla, his electric car company, sank.

Until he controversially endorsed Trump last year – a decision he appears to be reconsidering following the administration’s crackdown on illegal immigrants – Rogan resisted being labelled as either a Democrat or Republican, although few mistook him for a bleeding-heart liberal.

The Joe Rogan Experience is definitely not to everyone’s taste. He’s upset liberals with unvarnished views on trans-people and women (he likes ‘bimbo’ jokes and calls women ‘chicks’) while Spotify has conceded he has a ‘history of using some racially insensitive language’. Rogan has been accused of anti-Semitism, particularly in 2023 after he declared: ‘The idea that Jewish people are not into money is ridiculous.’

It’s a fact, however, that a commentator who got into hot water for repeatedly using the ‘N word’ on the show still boasts many young black guys in his audience. Rogan, even his fiercest critics concede, is too powerful to be ‘cancelled’.

His defence, trotted out whenever some new firestorm erupts, is that he’s a stand-up comedian, not a trained journalist, and that he invites people on his show simply because they have something interesting to say.

His critics – increasingly from the Left – counter that when so many people trust what they hear on his podcast, Rogan has a duty to challenge the guests. And that, if he’s not up to doing that, he shouldn’t give them airtime. When Trump appeared on the podcast, US TV channel CNN counted as many as 32 false claims, none of them flagged by Rogan.

Then there’s Rogan’s susceptibility to conspiracy theories. His claims that the Moon landings were faked and that the Ancient Egyptians didn’t build the pyramids proved harmless enough.

Then came the pandemic, when Rogan’s loopy Covid and anti-vaccine pronouncements caused widespread alarm.

His repeated attacks on Covid-19 vaccines, promotion of sceptics on his podcast (including one who compared America’s vaccine response to the rise of Nazi Germany) and his insistence that he’d dealt with the virus by taking a livestock deworming medicine led to an outcry among scientists and doctors in 2021.

They lambasted Rogan as a ‘menace to public health’. Veteran rock stars Neil Young and Joni Mitchell ended up withdrawing their music from Spotify in protest. On that occasion, Rogan put up a bizarre defence, admitting that he often says ‘stupid s***’, continuing: ‘I’m not a doctor. I’m a f***ing moron… I’m drunk most of the time and I do testosterone and I smoke a lot of weed. I’m not a respected source of information even for me.’

Unusual, certainly, but then his background could hardly have been less orthodox.

He was born in Newark, New Jersey. His father was a policeman and his mother a ‘free spirit’. He claims his father was a ‘very violent, scary guy’ and his parents divorced when he was five.

After moving to San Francisco, where his mother married a hippy and would visit their gay neighbours ‘to get naked with them and play the bongos and smoke pot’, Rogan says they relocated to Boston, Massachusetts. He drifted at school but, after a bully picked on him, took up martial arts with such passion that he became a US taekwondo champion in his teens.

Rogan dropped out of university and in 1988, encouraged by friends, went into stand-up comedy. This led to acting in the 1990s when he played a clueless electrician in NBC sitcom NewsRadio.

His macho image – Rogan boasted of having the world’s largest private collection of pornography – resulted in him being hired, from 2001 until 2006, to present Fear Factor, a reality TV series in which contestants had to undertake gruelling challenges. Meanwhile, he put his martial arts expertise to good use by becoming a cage-fighting commentator.

In 2009, just months before he launched his podcast, he married Jessica, despite having long dismissed marriage as pointless.

‘She lets me do whatever I do. That’s how we get along well,’ he told Rolling Stone in 2015. ‘A prenup? Of course. I’m ridiculous and dumb, but I’m not stupid.’

A brawler in his younger days, Rogan and his friends have credited his family – and cannabis, which he usually smokes before every podcast – with making him a ‘nicer’ person.

Now, even his enemies make sure they flatter him. ‘He ain’t a fan of mine but I’m a Joe Rogan fan – no bulls***,’ simpered California’s Left-wing governor Gavin Newsom last week.

But with his mind focused on making the most of his £480,000-a-week yacht, Rogan probably missed the compliment.