Elon Musk fancies himself equal parts comedic genius and free speech warrior. Turns out he sucks at both.
Musk has never missed a chance to pat himself on the back for his free speech bona fides and for sticking it to the Big Mean Leftists, who hate free speech and made comedy illegal. So he must have come out guns a-blazin’ to decry ABC for suspending Jimmy Kimmel, right?
Yeah, not so much. All Musk could offer up was a paltry little bit of government suck-up on X, saying that Kimmel is “disgusting.”
Come on, man. What happened to comedy being legal now, thanks to your magnanimous purchase of Twitter in order to preserve it?
Remember how bleak it was when it was clear that Musk’s purchase of the social media platform was imminent and everyone had to pretend that he was the most absolute of free speech absolutists—which he absolutely is not?
If he were, he might have taken issue with Ed Martin, one of President Donald Trump’s jack-of-all-trades bullies, who sent a formal, threatening letter to Democratic Rep. Robert Garcia of California after he called Musk a dick. A real free speech supporter, you’d think, would have told Martin to knock it off instead of letting him use the full force of the federal government to attack someone for calling Musk a mean name.
Elon Musk is seen with a chainsaw at CPAC 2025.
Part of why Musk can’t actually ever be funny is that he’s far too thin-skinned. This is the guy who’s so soft that, when people booed him during his surprise appearance at a Dave Chappelle show, he turned into a helpless little baby, whining, “Dave, what shall I say?”.
But Musk has a fix for all of that: friendly audiences. Like, extremely friendly, extremely unfunny audiences.
Take CPAC 2025, for example. In the midst of his heyday running the so-called Department of Government Efficiency and eviscerating the federal government from tip to tail, Musk showed up at the right-wing conference with a chainsaw—because when you’re juiced out of your gourd on ketamine and surrounded by yes-men, that stuff probably seems funny. And it was there that Musk complained about how “the left” made comedy “illegal.”
Musk has basically become the living embodiment of something actually funny:
Someone as wildly thin-skinned as Elon wants a world where everyone has to pretend that he’s funny just like we have to pretend that he’s protecting freedom.
But in the real world, he’s just an unfunny, fascist hack.
