Many had wondered how Musk would handle himself during a live comedy show. The answer was that he, and the show’s writers, sought to soften the rough edges of Musk’s public persona. Throughout the show, Musk gently poked fun at himself, including his penchant for provocative tweets and the time he smoked a joint on a podcast.’s
“To anyone I’ve offended I just want to say, I reinvented electric cars and I’m sending people to Mars on a rocket ship. Did you think I would be a chill, normal dude?”
Musk’s mother, Maye, joined him on stage and the two made a joke about Dogecoin, the cryptocurrency Musk has touted. Cryptocurrency jokes popped up throughout the show. In one sketch, Musk was cast as a bow-tie wearing cryptocurrency expert on the show’s Weekend Update segment.
Musk was most convincing playing a version of himself as head of SpaceX dealing with an emergency on a Martian colony. The crisis had a happy ending, until it didn’t.
In the end, Musk will keep his day jobs. Still, the “Saturday Night Live” appearance offered plenty of synergies with his real gigs as “technoking” and the head of Tesla, rocket launch company SpaceX and tunnel development firm the Boring Co.
Musk got days of attention across all forms of media ahead of the show, and shared the spotlight with a prototype of Tesla’s futuristic Cybertruck that Tesla brought to Manhattan on Friday. Video of the hulking, angular pickup prowling Manhattan streets blew up on social media.
