John Oliver has taken a deep dive into SpaceX, Tesla and X owner Elon Musk during the latest episode of "Last Week Tonight".
With his history of controversial decisions that's only escalated since his purchase of Twitter, Elon Musk — owner of SpaceX, Tesla, and X — seems a natural candidate for a Last Week Tonight deep dive.
In the 30-minute video above, host John Oliver leaves no stone unturned, from Musk's rise to power and the gambles that made him rich to his shift to the right and recent promotion of an anti-Semitic conspiracy that's led to advertisers leaving X in droves.
"I'll be honest: My feelings about Elon changed a bit in the writing of this piece. I'm probably now more impressed by what he's doing, but more worried by the fact that he's the one that's been doing it," says Oliver. "Because he cultivates an image that he's simply too visionary, too original to play by other people's rules, and he waves away the damage that he does as the cost of innovation and saving humanity.
"But the truth is, that way of thinking isn't remotely original. We've seen it so many times before. The least surprising thing on Earth is a middle-aged billionaire CEO with self-serving Libertarian views, increasingly racist politics, and a Messiah complex. And it is long past time that he faced the kind of accountability that should come with that — and not just from the echo chamber that he bought himself online, but from everyone whose lives are very much affected by him."
UPDATE Dec. 19, 2023, 10:34am EST: Elon Musk responded on X, saying Oliver "stopped being funny when he sold his soul to wokeness." Oliver, meanwhile, tweeted out his video as usual, with a follow-up post highlighting "Another absolute banger of a tweet for the archives."