John Oliver Lobs Insults at Elon Musk on ‘Last Week Tonight’: “A Man Who Can Pull Off Pretty Much Any Bad Guy in a Movie”

Kimberly Nordyke
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John Oliver did a deep dive into Elon Musk on Sunday’s Last Week Tonight, and came up with a slew of insults to lob at the billionaire tech mogul.

“This is our final show of the year, so we thought we’d focus on someone who’s had a pretty big 12 months,” the HBO late night show host said.

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He called Musk — owner of six companies, including SpaceX, Tesla, X (formerly Twitter), The Boring Company, Neuralink and xAI — “a man who can pull off pretty much any bad guy in a movie.”

Showing various photos of Musk giving different looks and wearing various outfits, Oliver went down his list of “bad guys” that he says Musk resembles: “There’s Lex Luthor posing for the cover of Metropolis Maniacs Monthly. There’s, ‘Why no, Mr. Bond, I and my child’s bride expect you to die.’ There’s, ‘I just bought your media company and I’m about to strip you for parts.’ There’s space’s first racist sheriff and, finally, the less f—able reimagining of Billy Zane’s character in Titanic. Truly, the man has range.”

Oliver then noted that Musk has made headlines this year “from test launching the most powerful rocket ever built to just this week having to recall 2 million cars due to safety concerns.” He also recapped how Musk challenged Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to a cage fight, “to which Zuckerberg replied, ‘Send me location,’ and may I suggest to both of them, ‘interior volcano’?”

Oliver continued: “And then of course, there is Twitter. He now calls it X, but the rest of us still call it Twitter. He officially acquired it 12 months ago. And since then it has been one fiasco after another with the most recent coming when he tweeted his agreement with [an] anti-semitic post calling the ‘great replacement theory’ the actual truth. That caused many big advertisers to flee. And then, in the midst of denying any anti-semitic intent, Elon decided to taunt the sponsors who had left.”

Oliver played a clip from a Nov. 29 interview in which Musk attacked the companies whose execs said they were going to pull their ads off the social media platform as a result of his posts.

“If someone is going to try and blackmail me with advertising? Blackmail me with money? Go f— yourself,” Musk said. “Go f— yourself, is that clear? I hope it is.”

Replied Oliver: “Wow, it is hard to say what’s most embarrassing there. The fact that the world’s richest man is playing the ‘You’re not breaking up with me, I’m breaking up with you’ card, or that he’s doing it to confused silence while wearing a jacket from Ralph Lauren’s ‘Midlife Crisis’ collection. He’s clearly going for a bad boy there but ended up looking more like … Chip from Rescue Rangers.“

Oliver also showed another clip from the same interview, in which Musk said: “What this advertising boycott is going to do, it’s going to kill the company. And the whole world will know that those advertisers killed the company and we will document it in great detail.”

When the interviewer said that the advertisers will push back against that assertion, Musk replied: “Oh yeah, oh tell that to Earth. Let’s see how Earth responds to that.”

Oliver joked that he hopes Musk follows through with that.

“I hope he tries telling every living creature on the planet, including those weird deep sea fish, all about how advertiser boycotts are going to kill Twitter. Just so one of them can open its objectively horrifying jaws and say, ‘Yeah, man, ’cause he said that weird shit about Jews. We live in a black void and even we understand the order of operations here.'”

Oliver went on to note that, thanks to the “roller-coaster fortunes” of the companies that he owns, Musk also has the dubious distinction of being “both the richest person in the world and the first person ever to lose $200 billion, which is hard to even wrap your head around. It’s like hearing someone ran a marathon after accidentally running 200 miles in the wrong direction.”

Oliver noted that Musk has boasted he’s done more to help the environment than any other person, referring to electric car maker Tesla, “demonstrating a pretty strong messianic streak,” opined Oliver. “In fact, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI who’s both worked with and clashed with Musk, has said Elon desperately wants the world to be saved, but only if he can be the one to save it, which is a pretty big asterisk. It’s like Jesus says in the book of Matthew, ‘Love thy neighbor, but more importantly, me, and if you don’t, fuck you. Find your own heaven. J-Crizzle, out.'”

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