Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk will be hosting Saturday Night Live on May 8, the show’s official account tweeted Saturday. And I have a lot of questions, namely: Why?
Musk may be known for his unconventional sense of humour, for lack of a better word, on Twitter, but is he entertaining enough to sustain a 90-minute time slot of comedy sketches? SNL sure seems to hope so. And no, his partner Grimes isn’t the episode’s musical guest. That role goes to Miley Cyrus, in what will be her sixth SNL appearance.
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— Saturday Night Live – SNL (@nbcsnl) April 24, 2021
As Variety notes, SNL has featured a few business hosts before, including New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner in 1990 and NBC’s own Brandon Tartikoff in 1983, but Musk will be the first tech CEO to take the stage.
His businesses have been making headlines in recent weeks, for better or worse. Last week, NASA tapped SpaceX to build the first lunar lander since the Apollo program, and its Crew Dragon spacecraft successfully docked with the International Space Station early Saturday morning, the company’s third crewed mission. Tesla, on the other hand, has come under fire yet again for its vehicles’ driver assistance system, or Autopilot, in the wake of a fatal crash in Texas. Federal safety regulators announced an investigation into the crash, in which a Tesla believed to be driverless crashed into a tree and burst into flames, earlier this week.
Musk has made a few pop culture cameos over the years — most notably in Iron Man 2 and The Big Bang Theory — and famously smoked a joint with Joe Rogan during one of his appearances on his podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience. But can his outlandish public persona and meme-based humour translate well into live comedy skits? I guess we’ll find out in a few weeks.