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Last night, Jon Stewart talked about Elon Musk and DOGE during his periodic return stint to his Daily Show pulpit—getting so worked up in the process that at one point Stewart accidentally smashed a mug, cutting his hand as he continued to deliver his takedown of Musk and his various feral internet teenagers’ efforts to “cut spending” in the federal government. In the aftermath of the segment (in which Stewart put forward several options for reducing overhead that weren’t just “put hundreds of thousands of people out of work while swinging around a chainsaw”), Musk apparently took notice: One of those people you’ve never met in real life who obsequiously tags the Tesla CEO with their every thought on Twitter/X suggested Musk go on the Comedy Central series for an informed debate, and the billionaire bit.
Musk, apparently, is contemplating the bait: He posited that he’d sit down for a conversation with Stewart if the resulting interview aired unedited. This response was noticed by the social media accounts for the show itself, which responded with a “We’d be delighted!” None of which is official, obviously, but The Daily Show is, at least, clearly interested in putting the ball back in Musk’s court if he’s going to float ideas like putting himself into the ring with Stewart. (As we write this, Musk has responded to someone posting a Fairly OddParents meme about how “fucking funny” this sit-down would be with a laughing emoji; we wonder, idly, if the oracles who used to divine hidden signs and messages in the entrails of pigs ever stopped to reflect on how incredibly stupid their lives had become.)
If we’re being entirely honest, there are a lot of circumstances where this whole idea wouldn’t necessarily land for us: 20-plus years of Stewart calling out hypocrisy with very funny jokes has produced a lot of very funny jokes, and no appreciable difference in the amount of hypocrisy; the idea that people can be shamed out of harmful moral positions via incisive satire has lost a lot of power in our modern shame-agnostic world. That being said, Musk is a creature of astoundingly thin skin mixed with a desperate need to seem cool, and seeing that public persona get melted under Stewart’s well-researched and quick-witted ire is a flavor of schadenfreude we could definitely see ourselves enjoying. At the very least, it’d be an hour or so where he wasn’t actively making the world worse.
