Elon Musk was booed by thousands at a Dave Chappelle comedy show in San Francisco yesterday.
he richest man alive was brought onto the stage by the comedian, which quickly caused the crowd to turn their heads. “Applause and boos, I see,” said Chappelle, who himself faced public backlash over jokes about transgender people.
Chappelle then turned to Musk — who recently bought Twitter and laid off half of its employees — and said, “It seems like some of the people you fired are in the audience.”
Chappelle mocked his own audience, adding: “Did you notice one thing? All these people who are booing, and I’m just pointing out the obvious, have terrible seats.”
It was an awkward exchange, with Mr. Musk saying, “You didn’t expect that, did you?”
A video of the incident was posted on Twitter by a user named Cleo Patra and was widely shared. However, this account appears to have been deleted.
Mr Musk was much more optimistic about free speech on the social network, allowing Donald Trump, Jordan Peterson and Kanye West to return to the platform.
West was then suspended for telling podcast host Alex Jones that he “loves Hitler.”
This weekend, Mr Musk caused controversy himself after he accused Dr. Anthony Fauci of helping start the pandemic and called for the man, who was then America’s top Covid official, to be prosecuted for “lying” to Congress.
Mr Musk reiterated a theory that US-funded Chinese research into making viruses deadlier, a process known as “gain-of-function,” resulted in a strain of coronavirus leaking from a Wuhan lab and became Covid-19.
“He (Dr. Fauci) lied to Congress and funded the gain-of-function research that has killed millions of people. Not great imo,” Mr Musk tweeted.
“My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci,” he added, referring to the practice of including gender pronouns after one’s name.
The tweet went viral and critics denounced Mr Musk as a “new far-right activist”.
The United States gave money, including a grant in 2014, to an organization that worked with the Wuhan Institute of Virology to research possible coronaviruses from bats.
dr However, Fauci told Congress that the research had nothing to do with “gain-of-function” and that it was “molecularly impossible” that the viruses studied led to Covid-19.
In right-wing circles, the Musk tweet was received far more positively.
