On Sunday John Oliver devoted pretty much the entirety of Last Week Tonight to one subject: Elon Musk. For nearly 40 minutes the HBO host laid into the richest person on the planet (who briefly wasn’t), whom he summed up as a “middle-aged billionaire CEO with self-serving libertarian views, increasingly racist politics and a messiah complex.” Oliver did have some nice things to say about him, too, but he seemed sure Musk would balk anyway. And balk he has.
Oliver was great several years ago, but stopped being funny when he sold his soul to wokeness where humor is basically illegal.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 18, 2023
As caught by Page Six, the Space X/Tesla/Twitter guy responded to an apparent fan, who’d responded sarcastically to a post about Oliver’s segment. Musk responded predictably.
“Oliver was great several years ago, but stopped being funny when he sold his soul to wokeness where humor is basically illegal,” Musk wrote.
As it happens, Oliver didn’t spend too much time on Musk’s war on “wokeness,” which was part of the rightward turn he took amidst the early days of the pandemic.
Still, what on earth is Musk even talking about? Oliver’s show has barely changed at all in the last several years, each episode striking the usual 70-30 balance of genuine outrage to goofy jokes. Among the latter in Oliver’s Musk segment was saying Musk can “pull off pretty much any bad-guy-in-a-movie look,” comparing him to folks like Lex Luthor, a Bond villain, and Billy Zane in Titanic (albeit a “less f*ckable reimaging” thereof). In fact, that part was one of Oliver’s funnier digs, up there with describing one of his looks as a “red-pilled Chip from Rescue Rangers.”
In other words, maybe Musk is the one who changed, not Oliver. Although judging from Musk’s feed, it seems humor for him has always been illegal.
(Via Page Six)