Elon Musk Is Portrayed on ‘SNL’: “The Worst Thing South Africa Has Ever Done”

Elon Musk spent nearly half a billion dollars to get humiliated at the polls, but at least he came away with an SNL parody.

Jeremy Culhane played the mogul in an appearance with Weekend Update’s Colin Jost as he tried to make sense of his bruising electoral losses. The actor offered a persuasive impression of the mogul’s halting speeches and nonsensical attempts to change the subject with talk of a future that won’t happen. “Imagine, “Culhane’s Musk ended a sentence several times non-sequiturishly.

A few days after his major campaign investments came up fruitless (and in a week when his Cybertruck was officially deemed a failure, compounding the injury), comic Musk sought to change the subject

“You’re in the news because you wasted half a billion dollars on the midterms… almost all the candidates you backed lost,” Jost said.

“I’m in the news because my car did a flip… it was like a freaking Hot Wheel,” Musk replied with a Buttheadian enthusiasm.

Jost pointed out the irony that “you moved to Texas because California was run by Democrats” and now Texas would be too. “How does that make you feel?” Jost asked.

“Bad,” Musk said, before cluelessly changing the topic back to a car flip and barrage of so-you-know-uhs the mogul is known for. (In real life, Musk tried to turn the losses into vindication for the conspiracy theories that he was involved in rigging the 2024 election.)

The show’s writers piled on when they had Musk ask Grok to treat him to an “epic vulgar-roast” (Culhane’s coinage for what Musk considers a major burn) and the AI chatbot came back with, “You’re the worst thing South Africa has ever done;” “When you’re on TV it feels like a episode of ‘Hate on the Spectrum’;” and “If you have 100 more kids, maybe one of them will talk to you.”

Musk has been in the pop-cultural spotlight this fall with Alex Gibney’s four-hour investigative documentary, which deconstructs the myth of mogul and makes a case he is far more dangerous than caricaturist appearances in Hollywood productions may suggest. Musk has recently has been buying up spectrum, spending $1 billion on Skydance and taking flack for allegedly turning off Starshield and potentially endangering Ukrainian lives.

The character had recently been played by Mike Myers, as in a cold open appearance a year ago as he maniacally bellowed “Legalize Comedy” behind portrayals of Trump and Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and other appearances in which he did an unhinged air-pounding two-first dance. That impression had a lot of scenery-chewing swings (and more than its share of Mike Myers being Mike Myers), while Culhane Saturday night was more effectively restrained and on-point, leaving the possibility he might be reprising the character on future SNL episodes.

Gibney’s film notes how Musk has been savvy at doing cartoonish enough behaviors that people tend to underestimate him, a point that was underscored even in the sketch when, after he went off one more time about a vulgar epic-roast and a car flip, Jost said “I cannot believe you’re the richest person in the world.”

SNL has a tricky relationship with the mogul. Five years ago, Musk himself hosted in an appearance that prompted a boycott from multiple cast members, led to Chloe Fineman crying and is now seen as a bad choice to cuddle-ify a toxic figure.

The appearance Saturday could be seen the show’s attempt to atone for that misstep, though some critics will say it further turns Musk into a colorful media character at the expense of his status as a graver threat.