‘SNL’s Chole Fineman Reveals Elon Musk Was Bereft of Basic Decency

The mystery — not that it took Benoit Blanc to figure it out — has been solved. After Bowen Yang told Andy Cohen this summer that a certain male Saturday Night Live host made multiple cast members cry by hating on their sketch ideas, Chloe Fineman outed herself last night as one of the walking wounded. The offender isn’t a shocker: Elon Musk.

Maybe Lorne Michaels got to Fineman because she deleted her TikTok confession, but not before it was seen by the masses. The video was a reaction to Musk’s umbrage at Dana Carvey’s new impression, a bouncing, marble-mouthed, “supercool” ruler in waiting.

“Dana Carvey just sounds like Dana Carvey,” sniffed Musk on Twitter or whatever he’s calling it now, spatting on the show he was once dying to host. “SNL has been dying slowly for years, as they become increasingly out of touch with reality. Their last-ditch effort to cheat the equal airtime requirements and prop up Kamala before the election only helped sink her campaign further.” 

All of Musk’s belly-aching got to Fineman. “OK, I just saw some news article about Elon Musk being like butt-hurt about SNL and his impression, but I’m, like, you’re clearly watching the show. Like, what are you talking about?” she said in the deleted video, as reported by Variety. “And I’m like, you know what? I’m gonna come out and say at long last that I’m the cast member that he made cry. And he’s the host that made someone else cry. Maybe there’s others.”

“I was like, I’m not gonna say anything. But I’m like, no, if you’re gonna go on your platform and be rude, like, guess what? You made I, Chloe Fineman, burst into tears because I stayed up all night writing the sketch. I was so excited, I came in, I asked if you had any questions, and you stared at me like you were firing me from Tesla and were like, ‘It’s not funny.'”

Fineman waited for Musk to say he was kidding. He wasn’t kidding. “You started pawing through my script, like flipping each page, being, like, ‘I didn’t laugh once, not one time.'” 

Musk wouldn’t have been the first host to dislike a sketch, but most aren’t quite so abrasive about it. “You know, have a little manners here, sir,” Fineman concluded.

Ironically, Musk pitched his own SNL sketch ideas that were met with silence by the show’s writers. At a recent tech conference, Musk, surrounded by giggling sycophants, regaled the crowd with his rejected idea — a bit in which he’d tell a cat-carrying Kate McKinnon that she had a nice pussy, while she’d respond to Musk and his rooster that she admired his cock. 

When Musk pitched the idea over a video call, he waited for laughs that never came. “I was like, is this thing working?” he wondered. “Are we muted?”  

“We hear you,” replied the despondent SNL writers.

Before Musk even arrived at Studio 8H, several cast members expressed their displeasure at Michaels’ controversial choice of host. Musk started his obnoxious behavior right away, tweeting “Let’s find out just how live Saturday Night Live really is.” (This may have been a reference to his planned rooster sketch, which started with a line about testing the show’s live credentials: “If you see my cock, you know it’s true.”)

Bowen Yang’s social media response was succinct:

The week that Musk hosted, Aidy Bryant retweeted a Bernie Sanders post complaining that “the 50 wealthiest people in America today own more wealth than the bottom half of our people.” The timing didn’t seem coincidental.

Andrew Dismukes just came right out with it, posting this on his Instagram story: “ONLY CEO I WANT TO DO A SKETCH WITH IS Cher-E Oteri.” 

It’s not as if Elon Musk showed up and gave a hilarious SNL performance to prove everyone wrong. “Musk appeared in various sketches as a creepy doctor, creepy partygoer, creepy TV show producer and creepy priest — something of a theme,” noted NPR. “This will go down as one of SNL’s worst episodes ever,” said The Guardian. Forget “episodes” — The Wrap wrote that “Elon Musk was the worst SNL host ever,” claiming that he “failed to land even a single joke.”

If “SNL has been dying slowly for years,” as Musk claimed this week, his episode might be the one that sent the show rolling into the grave.