Jon Stewart Won’t Stop Trolling Elon Musk on ‘The Daily Show’
Apparently dismantling the federal government is a lot easier than having a brief chat with the fifth-billed star of Death to Smoochy.
It’s been three weeks since Elon Musk publicly offered to guest on The Daily Show, after Jon Stewart’s lengthy takedown of the Trump administration’s DOGE cuts. But Musk only agreed to appear on the Comedy Central show if the interview “airs unedited,” which wasn’t a problem since, as Stewart pointed out, “that’s actually how the in-studio interviews normally air.”
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The Daily Show staff immediately took him up on said offer via a post on social media, and Stewart later reiterated that invitation on the air, claiming that he’d be “delighted” to have the chainsaw-wielding billionaire on the show. In retrospect, that may have been the best acting that Stewart has done since 1998’s The Faculty.
But Musk was a no-show. He later tried to suggest that Stewart was just too partisan, and even a “propagandist,” an excuse that Stewart promptly called bullshit on, considering that it was coming from “the guy who custom-made his own dark MAGA hat” and who poured hundreds of millions of dollars into Trump’s campaign, and recently supported the far-right AfD party in Germany.
While that could have just been that, Stewart clearly isn’t done roasting the Tesla CEO. At the top of this week’s show, after noting that the guest was the far-less controversial Paul Rudd, Stewart couldn’t help but take a few jabs at Musk without once mentioning his name. “Paul Rudd finally had the balls to come on this show after weeks of calling me a propagandist,” Stewart told the audience. “Know this: Our interview will be unedited. Rudd’s going down. It’s happening.”
The joke wasn’t totally unrelated to the segment that followed, which countered the right’s alleged love of free speech, with the many examples of them working overtime to quash free speech. And Stewart carved out a few minutes to call out social media apps, including X, which he claimed are free speech “in the way that Doritos are food.”
Clearly, Stewart isn’t prepared to let this go — nor should he. The world’s richest man, who has a key role in the current White House, seemingly being afraid to answer questions about his government cuts on a show that’s preceded by reruns of Family Guy is objectively funny.
But it seems pretty doubtful that Musk will change his mind anytime soon, especially not after an episode from last week found host Jordan Klepper dismantling Musk’s claims of victimhood in response to rampant Tesla vandalism.
Incidentally, Musk’s statements were from a recent interview with Sean Hannity. Yes, apparently Stewart is too politically biased for Musk, unlike the famously open-minded and nonpartisan Hannity.
