New York
CNN
—
On Sunday, Elon Musk joined Dave Chappelle on stage in San Francisco, home to Twitter’s headquarters, where the world’s richest man recently laid off many employees. Everything is as you expected.
The crowd at Chase Center booed loudly Musk, who spent much of the weekend dabbling in the culture wars, making transphobic comments that seemed to echo the QAnon tropes.
At Sunday’s Chappelle show, video of the incident captured by attendees showed the controversial Twitter owner taking the stage and yelling Chappelle’s famous Rick James impression: “I’m rich, b***h.” Afterwards, Musk was booed loudly for several minutes.
That reaction prompted Chappelle, who has also been criticized for making jokes about transgender people, to tell Musk that “it sounds like some of the people you fired were in the audience.”
At one point, when Musk tried to speak, Chappelle cut him off and said, “Don’t say anything. Do you hear that voice, Elon? That’s the voice of impending civil unrest.”
After more jeers, Chappelle ended his show with reprimands and prayers.
“Hushing is not the best thing you can do,” he said. “I hope that the joy of freedom is felt by everyone in this auditorium, and may your pursuit of happiness set you free. Amen.”
On Monday, Musk appeared to approve of the incident, in response to a user tweeting that there was a “group full of boos.”musk claim It “was 90% cheers and 10% boos (except during quiet periods), however, there was still a lot of boos, which was a first for me in real life (common on Twitter).”
Chappelle gave Musk several chances to address the crowd, but Musk didn’t react much on stage, according to several people who tweeted video of the event.
After Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion, the billionaire owner has taken a series of cost-cutting steps. He fired roughly half the company’s workforce, leading a group of former employees to file a lawsuit alleging the mass layoffs involved multiple labor rights violations.
The remaining employees had to agree to do “extremely hard” work, which seems to have put some people to sleep at Twitter’s headquarters. San Francisco is investigating reports that Musk has converted several areas of the office building into makeshift bedrooms.
The incident at the Chase Center capped a weekend in which Musk, with a history of erratic behavior and inflammatory remarks, was fully embroiled in the culture wars. Musk tweeted that the outgoing director of the National Institute of Health and Infectious Diseases, Anthony Fauci, should be indicted, writing that his “pronoun is sue/Fauci.” Musk has been vocal about Fauci’s response to the Covid pandemic, including the lockdown affecting his Tesla factory.
Musk also repeated tropes from the QAnon conspiracy theory movement, falsely suggesting that Twitter’s former trust and safety chief Yoel Roth’s doctoral thesis made him an advocate for the sexualization of children. The tweets exposed Roth to abuse and abusive behavior online.
Musk continued his culture warfare campaign again on Monday warn Clues about what he calls the “clear mind virus.”
