Even if you’re not a regular viewer of Saturday Night Live, you probably knew that last night’s guest—Elon Musk—was both highly anticipated and highly contested. Musk, the business magnate involved with both Tesla and SpaceX, was seemingly-criticized by some SNL cast members for his selection to serve as special guest on the May 8 episode of the long-running late-night comedy series. At the same time, economists and crypto pundits wondered if Musk’s tweeting about Dogecoin was going to cause the meme crypto coin to spike in value.
Well, now that it’s Sunday morning and the dust has settled, what did we learn from one of the more anticipated episodes of SNL in recent memory? Will Musk’s performance be as talked about in the coming days as Phoebe Bridgers’ guitar smash? Here are four takeaways from Elon Musk’s performance on last night’s show.
Dogecoin did not have its day in the sun
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Perhaps the biggest news about Elon Musk’s appearance on Saturday Night Live centered around whether or not he’d use the mass media platform to spread even more positive sentiment around Dogecoin. Musk has tweeted about the crypto coin with relative frequency in the past few months, even calling himself The Dogefather. As such, many crypto investors were keen on his SNL run and hoped that the coin would rally to values at or above a dollar.
While Dogecoin was trading at about $0.73 on Saturday at its high (and trending up since 4/20), it has since sunk to about $0.44 as of the time of this writing. Even though the coin got multiple shoutouts in last night’s episode, Musk’s admission during a segment of Weekend Update that the coin was a “hustle” certainly didn’t help things—even as he claimed in the same segment it would “go to the moon!” In the midst of many investors trying to sell off the coin and stave off their losses, popular mobile investing platform Robinhood reportedly faced several outages with their crypto trading. The Robinhood outages combined with Musk’s comments on the coin could be a double-whammy for many who were buying into the coin prior to his guest star.
Musk makes history as first host with Asperger syndrome
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Just minutes into Musk’s opening monologue on Saturday Night Live, he spoke about how excited he was to be hosting, following up that statement with the phrase, “I mean that.” He explained that he frequently uses that phrase when talking to others since he doesn’t always communicate with a lot of intonation—admitting that that can make for good comedy. He then went on to say that he was making history as “the first person with Aspergers to host SNL” to cheers and applause from the audience.
Also known as Asperger syndrome (or AS), Aspergers is a neurodevelopmental disorder on the same spectrum as the Autism spectrum. Musk went on to say that this meant he wouldn’t make a lot of eye contact with the cast, but turned that into a joke by saying that he was “pretty good at running ‘Human’ in emulation mode.” Discussing his Twitter presence he went on to share that, “I know I sometimes say or post strange things, but that’s just how my brain works. To anyone I’ve offended, I just want to say that I reinvented electric cars and I’m sending people to Mars in a rocket ship. Did you think I was also going to be a chill, normal dude?”
Musk had some funny moments
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So, how was Musk when it actually came to performing in SNL’s comedy skits? While the episode itself was a bit of a mixed bag in terms of which sketches were successful and which fell a little flat, for the most part, Musk did a solid job. His opening monologue was both humorous and enlightening, offering insights into Elon’s life and vision for the future with a few well-placed punchlines. While Musk certainly isn’t an actor or a comedian, he definitely didn’t phone in his performance either. From playing Icelandic television producers to a doctor and even Wario in a Mario Kart-centric courtroom sketch, Elon is game to do it all.
In the sketch “Cowboy Standoff,” Musk’s inconsistent Wild West dialect is just as fun to experience as his willingness to play a cowboy stand-in for himself as the butt of most of the jokes. LeRon the Cowboy is teased for being the genius of the group, having an electric horse, and not wearing a mask to a bank robbery. He might not make as convincing a cowboy as some of the other actors in the sketch, but his giggling and clear excitement to be on the show definitely make it an amusing segment nonetheless.
In the sketch “Post-Quarantine Conversation,” lampooning “every conversation with people you haven’t seen since quarantine started,” Elon plays someone at a party where the inner monologues of each partygoer are played out after each mundane phrase they speak aloud. In a discussion about which vaccine a fellow partygoer got, Musk gets one of the best lines of the sketch, commenting that Heidi Gardner’s fatigue after the second dose of Pfizer, “Sounds like a unique experience you should tell everyone about.” That’s followed up with the juxtaposition of the idyllic portrait Musk paints of getting to work from home and see his wife more with the fact that he’s losing his job and getting a divorce. Overall, this is one of the better sketches of the night, and Musk fits in just as well as any other cast member would.
Whether or not you were tuning in to see if Musk said something to manipulate the crypto markets or just you see if he was funny and gelled with other cast members, ratings for last night’s episode of SNL were up significantly compared to recent episodes of the show. According to Deadline, the episode garnered “a 4.7 household Live+Same Day rating in the 44 metered local markets,” which was up from a 3.6 on the April 11 episode guest starring Carey Mulligan and Kid Cudi. Only Chris Rock and Dave Chappelle have earned similar ratings this season, showing that controversial or not, Musk was a smart programming choice. Social media interaction around last night’s Chad on Mars sketch, as well as the courtroom Wario sketch featuring Musk and musician Grimes, both have received a lot of attention.
While Elon Musk’s performance on Saturday Night Live was definitely hyped for external factors, the episode itself wasn’t too harmed by his presence, illustrating that some of the cast members’ worries may have been a bit unfounded, at least from a performance perspective. Plus, with the fact that Dogecoin’s value dropped significantly and Musk revealed for the first time publicly that he has Aspergers, the episode will certainly have some staying power even if some sketches were more amusing than anything else.
