John Oliver Takes Aim at Elon Musk on ‘Last Week Tonight’

John Oliver took aim at Elon Musk on Sunday’s Last Week Tonight, lobbing insults at the billionaire tech mogul on his final show of the year. “We thought we’d focus on someone who’s had a pretty big 12 months,” the late-night host said of the owner of six companies, including SpaceX, Tesla, X (formerly Twitter), and xAI.

Oliver went on to introduce Musk as “a man who can pull off pretty much any bad guy in a movie,” showing him in various outfits and poses.

“There’s Lex Luthor posing for the cover of Metropolis Maniacs Monthly,” said Oliver. “There’s ‘Why no, Mr. Bond, I and my child 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 fuckable reimagining of Billy Zane’s character in Titanic. Truly, the man has range.”

Oliver went on to explain how 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 brought up Musk challenging 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’?”

“And then, of course, there is Twitter,” continued Oliver. “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] antisemitic post calling the great replacement theory the actual truth. That caused many big advertisers to flee. And then, in the midst of denying any antisemitic intent, Elon decided to taunt the sponsors who had left.”

Oliver played a clip from the Nov. 29 New York Times DealBook Summit, in which Musk went on an unhinged rant against execs that said they were going to pull their ads off the social media platform in response to Musk’s posts.

“If someone is going to try and blackmail me with advertising? Blackmail me with money? Go fuck yourself,” Musk said. “Go fuck 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 ‘Red Pill’ Chip from Rescue Rangers.”

Oliver went on to point out that, thanks to the “roller coaster fortunes” of the companies that he owns, Musk also has the 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 run a marathon after accidentally running 200 miles in the wrong direction.”

Oliver brought up Musk boasting that, through Tesla, he’s done more to help the environment than any other person, in the process “demonstrating a pretty strong Messianic streak. 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.’”

The full segment tackled the cost of Musk’s progress within both rocket technology and automaking, including the US government’s dependency on his satellites. “A lot of the things that this country relies on are controlled by Musk,” explained Oliver. “That puts the US government in a bit of a bind.” A clip followed of a National Security Council spokesman explaining why they would not push back on Musk’s antisemitic rhetoric. “We’re now at the point where the government is explicitly saying, ‘We’ve chosen to look the other way on the antisemitism thing,’ or, as it’s more commonly known, as Daddy’s Home 2.” 

Watch the full clip below.