When Elon Musk joined Dave Chappelle on stage during a comedy show in Silicon Valley on Sunday night, he was met with a cold reception.
Chappelle welcomed the billionaire to the stage for a surprise appearance near the end of his set at San Francisco’s Chase Center, eliciting loud, unrelenting boos from the audience.
“Make some noise for the world’s richest man,” Chappelle said, and attendees did — just not in the way the two had probably expected. Later, the comedian would tell the audience to “shut the f—- up.”
“It sounds like some of those people you fired are here,” Chappelle joked to the billionaire, who couldn’t say much due to the jeers. Musk paced around the stage, waving to the audience, which elicited even more boos, and later asked Chappelle, “Weren’t expecting this, were you?”
Musk dismissed the reaction, saying that “technically, it was 90% cheers and 10% boos, but that’s a lot of boos, which is a first for me in real life.” “It’s almost as if I’ve offended San Francisco’s deranged leftists.”
Tesla founder Elon Musk purchased Twitter for $44 billion in October and immediately laid off top executives and thousands of employees. His changes to the platform, which included reversals of misinformation, moderation, and verified account policies, drew criticism and contributed to an increase in hate speech, prompting a celebrity and public figure exodus.
During the rollback of Twitter’s COVID-19 misinformation policy, Musk sparked outrage over the weekend by calling for the prosecution of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the president’s chief medical advisor, while mocking nonbinary pronouns. “Prosecute/Fauci are my pronouns,” he tweeted. It received backing from far-right figures such as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Chappelle, too, has sparked debate with his 2021 Netflix special The Closer, which has been labelled transphobic. The comedian’s monologue on Saturday Night Live last month, which addressed the Kanye West scandal, was also criticised as anti-Semitic.
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