South Park—now three episodes into what is pretty clearly going to be a sustained, season-long attack on Donald Trump—shifted its focus from the Trump White House to the structures that prop it up this week, with the third episode of the show’s highly-watched 27th season taking aim at the various techbros who line up to kiss Trump’s ass in exchange for favors. Sure, there were plenty of the usual personal attacks lobbed at the man himself throughout “Sickofancy”—the episode depicting both Trump’s rampant demand for gifts, and his current occupation of Washington D.C., as parts of an ongoing effort to be reassured he doesn’t have that micro-penis the show gave us such a loving look at last month. But by bringing in what turned out to be only very mild caricatures of folks like Mark Zuckerberg and Apple’s Tim Cook (amidst wider critiques of people’s reliance on ChatGPT, and an obligatory once-every-few-years Towelie plotline), the show made it clear that all these money men are happy to bow and kiss as much of Trump’s ass as is required to get what they want. Almost all of them, at least—because the show seemed to very deliberately hold off on that most in-bed-with-Trump tech guy of them all, Elon Musk.
Hard not to note, in that light, that Musk is also the only member of America’s current tech-billionaire class to have actually appeared on South Park himself, having lent his voice to three episodes of the series back in 2019. (He’d previously been voiced by series co-creator Matt Stone in an earlier episode. Stone and co-creator Trey Parker have reportedly talked about hanging out socially with Musk on more than one occasion.) In an episode that goes out of its way to show American tech kneeling down and abetting Trump, the absence of the tech billionaire who’d most enthusiastically (and awkwardly) jumped into the man’s inner circle can’t help but feel a little odd.
Now, you could argue that Parker and Stone did reserve the most horrible fate of all for Musk, translating several elements of his public persona into the show’s most persistently stupid man, Randy Marsh. (Including gifting Randy a ketamine addiction that drops his ability to function even lower than usual, and eventually forcing him to admit that he’s bankrupted his family through short-sighted, idiotic schemes.) Still, given that part of what’s been fascinating about this season of South Park has been the show’s sudden disinterest in obfuscating its attacks on figures like Trump, Kristi Noem, or even Zuckerberg or Cook, going back to the “established character serves as stand-in for real-world shithead” route that marked much of the show’s previous Trump coverage does feel like a somewhat surprising choice. South Park has been going gloves-off this season, in a genuinely eye-catching way, so any sign of them acting slightly more diplomatically is a little hard to parse. (If they were worried that Musk would jump too enthusiastically into their ongoing game of “Which of our trolling victims can we get to bite and help promote the show?” they probably needn’t have worried; Musk seems to have been completely ignoring the season, and spent Wednesday night as men of letters so often do, filling his Twitter timeline with videos of artificially generated anime women and their various artificially generated tits and asses.)
