Dave Chappelle brings out Elon Musk during comedy set to chorus of boos

Twitter CEO Elon Musk received a chilly welcome in Silicon Valley when he joined Dave Chappelle on stage during a comedy show on Sunday night.

Toward the end of his set at Chase Center in San Francisco, Chappelle welcomed the billionaire to the stage for a surprise appearance, eliciting loud, unrelenting boos from the audience. "Make some noise for the richest man in the world," Chappelle said, and attendees did — just not in the way the two had likely anticipated. The comedian would later tell the crowd to "shut the f--- up."

"It sounds like some of those people you fired are in the audience," Chappelle quipped to the billionaire, who couldn't get much of a word in through the jeers. Clearly stunned, Musk paced around the stage and waved to the crowd — which elicited even more boos — and later asked Chappelle, "Weren't expecting this, were you?"

Musk dismissed the reception and tweeted that "technically, it was 90% cheers" and "10% boos but, still, that's a lot of boos, which is a first for me in real life," he said. "It's almost as if I've offended SF's unhinged leftists."

The Tesla founder acquired Twitter for $44 billion in October and laid off top executives and thousands of employees en masse. His overhaul of the platform, including reversals of misinformation, moderation, and verified account policies, have drawn criticism and contributed to a rise of hate speech, prompting a celebrity and public figure exodus.

Amidst the rollback of Twitter's COVID-19 misinformation policy, Musk sparked backlash over the weekend when he called for the prosecution of Dr. Anthony Fauci, chief medical advisor to the president, while mocking nonbinary pronouns. "My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci," he tweeted. It drew support from far-right figures, including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Brian Stukes/WireImage; Taylor Hill/Getty Images Dave Chappelle; Elon Musk

Chappelle, too, has courted controversy with his 2021 Netflix special The Closer, which has been condemned as transphobic. The comedian's monologue on Saturday Night Live last month addressing the Kanye West fallout has also been slammed as anti-Semitic.

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