John Oliver closed out his final show in November 2024 wishing for “less Elon Musk” in the new year. “I think I might just stop wishing for things. There’s a genie with a very sick sense of humor somewhere,” he said to USA Today ahead of the premiere of Last Week Tonight‘s 12th season. “I don’t see us getting any less Elon Musk anytime soon. We’re getting more and more of him to a medically inadvisable degree.”
And so it is: the Emmy winner ripped into Musk, his bullshit Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), and President Donald Trump in the premiere of his HBO political comedy series. He lambasted the administration for hiring fascistic youths to pull apart critical agencies, for allowing them access to Americans’ private data, and for its dubious plan to offer federal workers money to resign. “Setting aside whether it’s even a real or legal offer, ‘Take this money now or risk being eliminated’ isn’t how you run the federal government. It’s how you run Beast Games,” the host said. As for the technocrat-in-chief, Oliver took issue with Musk’s Twitter/X post boasting that he‘d “spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper. Could gone [sic] to some great parties. Did that instead.”
“First, no you could not, because any party you attend is definitionally terrible,” Oliver said. “And second, don’t you have like 100 kids? Go hang out with them on the weekends, you parasitic freak!” You can check out the full segment below.
Speaking with USA Today, Oliver admitted, “We generally don’t like to follow what’s happening in the news of the week, but that’s harder to do when the administration is this chaotic.” One of the key differences between Last Week Tonight and The Daily Show—his previous gig where he recently returned to banter with Jon Stewart—is that Last Week Tonight does more long-form reports. “Hopefully going forward we’ll be able to contain the chaos of the Trump administration at the start of the show, and then the main body of it can be left for the more systemic issues which we’re more interested in covering, showing people things they haven’t seen before rather than stuff they’re seeing all the time,” Oliver told the outlet. Fingers crossed!
