At a Dave Chappelle comedy event on Sunday night, the audience booed tech billionaire Elon Musk.
At a special Punchline Comedy Club performance at the Chase Center in San Francisco, the comedian invited the Tesla CEO to the stage.
The crowd can be seen booing Musk in a video posted to Twitter. Musk’s recent acquisition of the social media platform has drawn criticism due to worries of mass layoffs and laxer content moderation.
“Ladies and gentlemen, make some noise for the richest man in the world,” Chappelle instructs the audience. There were a few cheers from the audience, but there was also a loud chorus of jeers.
“You weren’t expecting this, were you?” Chappelle asked Musk after the boos.
“It sounds like some of those people you fired are in the audience,” Chappelle adds.
“All these people that are booing, I’m just pointing out the obvious — they have terrible seats in the stadium,” Chappelle says later in the video.
The Twitter account of the person who posted the video first appears to have been suspended or deleted, with the message: “This Tweet is from an Account that No Longer Exists.” It has since been reposted from several accounts.
Twitter—which fired a number of communications professionals as part of its effort to reduce its headcount by about half—was not immediately available for comment, CNBC reported.
James Yu, a Twitter user who claimed to have attended the Chappelle event, wrote on his account: “A good 80% of the stadium boos. 18k people.”
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“Dave gave him so many chances to speak but he just put his hands in his pockets,” Yu said.
“I actually felt bad for him. I’m by no means an Elon fanboy, more a centrist. I wanted to shake him: for the love of god man, say something and pretend it’s a tweet!!”
In a Monday tweet, Musk responded to the booing.
“Technically, it was 90% cheers & 10% boos (except during quiet periods), but, still, that’s a lot of boos, which is a first for me in real life (frequent on Twitter). It’s almost as if I’ve offended SF’s unhinged leftists… but nahhh.”
Democrats, LGBTQ activists, and others have taken offence at the conservative tycoon’s statements.
Musk received criticism for a tweet sent out on Sunday that targeted Anthony Fauci, the departing chief medical advisor for the United States and the face of the administration’s reaction to Covid-19. The remark fueled a firestorm of online harassment and conspiratorial ideas aimed at the seasoned immunologist.
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Musk has often criticised the use of lockdowns to stop the spread of the coronavirus, having once projected that the epidemic would cease in April 2020.
Musk made fun of the practice of referring to someone’s gender with pronouns in a tweet on Sunday. The billionaire tweeted, “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci.”
Many Twitter users criticised the remark for its transphobic overtones. For making transphobic jokes in his Netflix stand-up special The Closer, Chappelle has come under fire himself.
