Elon Musk was booed by thousands of people at a Dave Chappelle comedy show in San Francisco on Monday. The world’s richest man was brought out on stage by the comedian, quickly causing the crowd to turn.
“Cheers and boos, I see,” said Chappelle, who himself has faced a public backlash over inflammatory jokes about transgender people. Chappelle then turned to Musk, who recently bought Twitter and sacked half of its employees, and said: “It seems like some of the people you fired are in the audience.” Mocking his own crowd, Chappelle added: “Have you noticed one thing? All those people who are booing, and I’m just pointing out the obvious, they have terrible seats.”
It was an uncomfortable exchange, in which Musk said “You weren’t expecting this were you?” A video of the incident was posted on Twitter by a user called Cleo Patra and was shared widely. However, that account appears to have been deleted. It is not completely clear if this was done by the users themselves, or by Twitter.
Musk has been much more bullish about free speech on the social network, allowing Donald Trump, Jordan Peterson and Kanye West to return to the platform. West was then suspended because he told podcast host Alex Jones that he “loves Hitler”.
This weekend, Musk himself caused controversy after accusing Dr Anthony Fauci of helping to spark the outbreak of the pandemic, calling for the man who was then America’s leading Covid official to be prosecuted for “lying” to Congress.
Musk repeated a theory that US-funded Chinese research into making viruses more deadly, a process known as “gain-of-function”, led to a coronavirus strain leaking from a laboratory in Wuhan that became Covid-19. “He (Fauci) lied to Congress and funded gain-of-function research that killed millions of people. Not awesome imo,” Musk tweeted.
“My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci,” he added, referring to the practice of indicating gender pronouns after one’s name. The tweet went viral and critics denounced Musk as a “new far-Right wing activist”.
The Daily Telegraph in London
