Tech mogul Elon Musk, who seems to think of himself as a comedian, unexpectedly showed up Sunday at a stand-up performance with Dave Chappelle in San Francisco.
Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX who recently acquired Twitter, was loudly booed by the crowd when Chappelle introduced him by saying, “Ladies and gentlemen, make some noise for the richest man in the world,” according to a video clip shared by CNN.
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The right-leaning mega-billionaire came out on stage at the Chase Center arena in San Francisco wearing a Twitter T-shirt. Amid the chorus of boos (and some cheers) from the audience, Chappelle quipped, “It sounds like some of them people you fired are in the audience.”
Chappelle was referring to Musk’s draconian job cuts after he closed the $44 billion deal for Twitter in late October. After he officially became Twitter’s owner, Musk fired the senior management team and then appointed himself CEO. He’s since laid off half of Twitter’s 7,500-member workforce and demanded that remaining employees commit to an “extremely hardcore” work culture (a fiat that reportedly led to the exit of another 1,200-plus workers).
During Musk’s brief appearance on stage with Chappelle, the comedian also prompted Musk to yell out, “I’m rich, bitch!”, a reference to a Rick James sketch from “Chappelle’s Show.”
Earlier Sunday, Musk had targeted Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the chief medical adviser to the U.S. president, in a tweet calling for Fauci to be prosecuted — presumably because of Fauci’s advising on a policy of lockdowns during the COVID-19 crisis — while also mocking the use of alternate pronouns. “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci,” Musk tweeted. Chappelle has been criticized for his anti-trans and anti-gay comments, including in his Netflix stand-up special “The Closer.”
Musk last year hosted an episode of “Saturday Night Live.” He is notorious for sharing jokes and memes on Twitter, where he currently has 121 million followers.
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