Miley Cyrus and Elon Musk at “Saturday Night Live” rehearsals. – Rosalind O’Connor / NBC
Dave Chappelle, Chris Rock, Timothée Chalamet, Maya Rudolph and… Elon Musk. No need to look for the intruder in this list of master of ceremonies Saturday Night Live this season. On Saturday night, the Tesla boss, who will be officiating live on NBC’s famous entertainment show, joins a short list of non-entertainment presenters. And not everyone likes it.
ELON MUSK. MILEY CYRUS.
THIS SATURDAY pic.twitter.com/6miGBj90XJ– Saturday Night Live – SNL (@nbcsnl) May 7, 2021
Not an artist
You need a minimum of artistic flair to present SNL. The show generally recruits the person in charge of the opening monologue and then to pass the dishes in three main categories: actors, comedians and singers. Although Elon Musk is able to put on a show when he introduces a vehicle and has a few cameos on television and in cinema to his credit (Iron man 2, The Big Bang Theory, Ricky and morty), it’s not Will Ferrell or Alec Baldwin. Bowen Yang, SNL screenwriter since 2018 and actor since 2019, responded with a dubious emoji to a tweet from Elon Musk asking, “Let’s see how Saturday Night Live is really live ”. Musk, who terrorized Tesla’s board by smoking a live joint during a chat with Joe Rogan, has since vowed to behave well.
This is not the first time that SNL has made a media stunt by recruiting outside the seraglio. In 1997, New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani officiated, and it was pretty funny, with a lot of self-mockery. And in November 2015, NBC offered the platform to Donald Trump just before the start of the Republican primary. Mike Schur, screenwriter of the show at the end of the 90s, recently estimated that the chain had made “big mistake” in helping to “normalize” the candidate.
And obviously, we do not forget Donald Trump in November 2015, before the first Republican primary, when he was already leading the polls (SNL was accused of having “normalized” Trump) https://t.co/B3G0PWCAZ6
– Philippe Berry (@ptiberry) May 7, 2021
Self-promotion of the 3rd richest man in the world
Another member of the troop expressed her disapproval on social media. In an Instagram story that she has since deleted, Aidy Bryant, who notably played on the show the former White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders, posted a screenshot of this former tweet from Bernie Sanders: “America’s 50 richest people have more wealth than half of Americans combined. It is moral obscenity. A tackle assumed as Elon Musk is the third richest man in the world, with a fortune estimated by Forbes at 166 billion dollars.
SNL will also have an unusual audience on Saturday: the financial markets. Tesla shareholders are hoping for an impact on sales and the stock price. And Elon Musk hinted that he could mention dogecoin, this absurd cryptocurrency whose price has increased 200 times in a year, in a sketch. On Twitter, dogecoin was among the most discussed topics on Friday, rising 100% in one week.
Rant from a former Tesla employee
Elon Musk has declared war on unions, downplayed the impact of Covid-19 and put pressure on Tesla employees in California during the pandemic. While the Californian authorities had ordered, in March 2020, the closure of the Fremont plant, deemed non-essential, the CEO had assured employees that they were “not obliged to come to work” while insisting that he “would personally go to work.”
“Elon Musk may introduce SNL, but Tesla workers are not kidding, ”writes in a editorial published by Fortune Richard Ortiz, a former employee who claims he was sacked in 2017 in retaliation for his efforts to form a union at the Fremont plant. He accuses his former boss of “treating workers as costs that must be minimized.” Will the controversy be worth it for Saturday Night Live ? Answer Sunday with the hearings.