This weekend on his season finale, Last Week Tonight host John Oliver devoted over 30 minutes of his show to a scathing takedown of Tesla/Twitter CEO Elon Musk, blasting him for his messiah complex, how dangerous he's become, and for being “a man who can pull off pretty much any bad-guy-in-a-movie look.”:

“There’s Lex Luthor, posing for the cover of Metropolis Maniacs Monthly. There’s ‘why no Mr Bond, I and my child bride expect you to die,’” Oliver said next to a photo of Musk and his former partner, the singer Grimes.

“There’s ‘I just bought your media company, I’m about to strip you for parts.’ There’s space’s first racist sheriff,” he continued. “And finally, the less fuckable reimagining of Billy Zane’s character in Titanic. Truly, the man has range.” [...]

Musk’s time at Twitter “has definitely changed … how many people perceive him”, Oliver noted. Until then, he had cultivated an image as a “maverick celebrity avenger who could cut through red tape, revolutionized space travel and made electric cars cool”.

Musk once bragged that he’d “done more for the environment than … any single human on Earth” demonstrating what Oliver called a “pretty strong messianic streak”. As Sam Altman, CEO of Open AI, put it in a Musk profile for the New Yorker: “Elon desperately wants the world to be saved. But only if he can be the one to save it.”

“Which is a pretty big asterisk,” Oliver noted. “It’s like Jesus says in the book of Matthew, ‘Love thy neighbor, but more importantly, me, and if you don’t, fuck you. Find your own heaven. J-Crizzle, out.’” [...]

“The fact Elon seems to be getting increasingly radicalized is a big problem because we put a lot of power into his hands, and much more than you may realize,” he continued. Because the government has also invested a lot of power in Musk – more and more of its control of the internet, the power grid, the transportation system, objects in orbit, national security infrastructure and its energy supply. Musk’s company Starlink, for example, now controls over half of all active satellites. [...]

“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.”

Musk responded, of course, because he can't help himself, with this lame shot at Oliver:

I hate to break it to him, but the ones who don't understand and who suck at humor are conservatives.