Elon Musk Booed Relentlessly During Cameo With Dave Chappelle (VIDEO)
Tech billionaire Elon Musk, whose early days as Twitter CEO can be described politely as controversial, got the shock of a lifetime Sunday night when his surprise appearance at Dave Chappelle’s comedy gig was met with a resounding chorus of boos.
“Ladies and gentlemen, make some noise for the richest man in the world,” Chappelle hollered to a crowd of 18,000 at San Francisco’s Chase Center, inviting Musk to join him onstage.
The self-proclaimed “Chief Twit,” whose latest antics garnered waves of support from the fringe right, got on stage with his arms raised, poised for a hero’s welcome when the vicious booing started.
\u201cTurns out Twitter can, in fact, be real life.\u201d— Steven Goffman (@Steven Goffman) 1670836266
In the discomfiting footage of the unwelcome cameo, Musk wandered around on stage red-faced, sometimes waving with a microphone in hand, visibly unsure of how to deal with the less-than-warm welcome.
Taken aback by the jeering, Chappelle — himself a merchant of controversial jokes about the transgender community — tried to defuse the situation, but the indefatigable detractors only grew louder.
“It sounds like some of those people you fired are in the audience,” Chappelle joked to ease the tension.
Indeed, upon his 44-billion-dollar takeover of the San Francisco-based Twitter, Musk fired thousands of employees and demanded “long hours at high intensity” of those who remained after the mass layoffs.
“All these people that are booing, I’m just pointing out the obvious, they have terrible seats in the stadium,” the comedian added snarkily.
Chappelle’s jokes eventually won over the audience by tweaking his special guest, as a video posted to Twitter showed. “His whole business model is fuck Earth; I’m leaving anyway,” the comedian said to raucous laughter. “The first comedy club of Mars…” he added.
However, when Musk tried to speak over the din of laughter, the boos would increase in intensity, drowning out the cheers in seconds. “What do I say, Dave?” Musk asked, desperate and embarrassed.
“Don’t say nothing,” Chappelle quipped. “That’s the sound of pending civil unrest.”
The booing continued and grew louder with each passing minute, giving Musk — who has seemingly thrived in the right-wing echo chamber that Twitter is expeditiously morphing into — a stunning dose of offline reality about his current popularity.
“Booing is not the best thing you can do. I wish everybody in this auditorium the joy of feeling free, and may your pursuit of happiness set you free. Amen,” Chappelle reprimanded the audience as he ended the show, clearly exasperated at the "cringefest" Musk’s appearance had turned out to be.
\u201cWhat is this cringe fest\u201d— Wu-Tang is for the Children (@Wu-Tang is for the Children) 1670884069
Back in the safe confines of his Twitterverse, Musk tried to rewrite the reality of the incident in a now-deleted tweet on Monday, claiming that “90%” of the crowd had cheered him and the hecklers were “unhinged leftists.”
\u201cElon Musk confirms he was booed last night, says it was a first for him, blames it on \u201cunhinged leftists\u201d. Maybe it was just actually the real world that exists outside his fanboy bubble.\u201d— Mike Sington (@Mike Sington) 1670849448
But some audience members confirmed to NBC News that Musk had mischaracterized the reception, which, in reality, had been almost all boos. “It was more boos than I’d ever heard,” an attendee told the outlet.
Writer James Yu, a netizen who was in the crowd on Sunday night, corroborated that version of events and added that Musk, shamed by the mass heckling, “absolutely turn[ed] into a corncob.”
\u201cWas at the Dave Chapelle show at SF tonight and who comes on but Elon Musk! \n\nA good 80% of the stadium boos. 18k people. and he withers. Like absolutely turns into a corncob. \n\n\u201cWhat should I say??\u201d He says\n\nDave tries to salvage the situation but to no avail\u201d— james yu (@james yu) 1670829489
The humiliation was perhaps a long time coming for Musk, who — with his obstinate and needless insistence to wade into culture wars — made unfounded accusations about Dr. Anthony Fauci, the outgoing director of the National Institutes of Health and Infectious Diseases, mocked the use of pronouns, and peddled a fresh batch of QAnon-style conspiracy theories over the weekend.
On Monday, Musk, once a prominent voice in climate change activism and a fan of climate change activist Greta Thunberg, warned in a tweet of a threat he branded “the woke mind virus.”
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