Jeremy Culhane turned up as Elon Musk on SNL on Saturday night, and the impression landed as a sharper, calmer answer to the show’s earlier takes on the mogul. The bit played out on Weekend Update with Colin Jost, who used the seat to hit Musk where the week had already bruised him: politics, public image and the habit of making himself the center of the news.
Jost opened with the bluntest line in the sketch, telling Musk that he was in the news because he wasted half a billion dollars on the midterms and that almost all the candidates he backed lost. Culhane’s Musk tried to flip the subject, saying his car had done a flip and that it was like a freaking Hot Wheel. The exchange set up the joke the sketch kept leaning on: Musk wants the story to be about spectacle, even when the numbers are bad.
Then came the punchline that gave the segment its edge. Musk asked Grok for an epic vulgar-roast, and the AI chatbot came back with lines that cut far harder than the late-night parody usually does. It called him the worst thing South Africa has ever done, said that when he is on TV it feels like a episode of Hate on the Spectrum, and added, if you have 100 more kids, maybe one of them will talk to you. Jost closed the beat by saying he could not believe Musk is the richest person in the world.
That is what made the sketch work. Culhane played Musk as absurd and vulnerable, but not as a complete fool. That matters because Musk has also been smart about behaving just cartoonishly enough that people sometimes underestimate him. The show leaned into the image of a man who seems like a punchline and also knows how to stay at the center of one. For SNL, that is the harder version of the joke to pull off.
The impression also puts Culhane in a different lane from Mike Myers, who played Musk a year ago in a cold open and later appeared in other Musk impressions. Saturday night’s version was more restrained and more on-point, which is why it leaves open the possibility that Culhane could come back for future SNL episodes. It also fits into the show’s ongoing and tricky relationship with Musk, a target it keeps returning to as he remains impossible to separate from politics, TV and the culture-war noise around him.
That backdrop is not subtle. Musk recently spent $1 billion on Skydance and drew criticism for allegedly turning off Starshield and potentially endangering Ukrainian lives, while Alex Gibney’s four-hour documentary is also busy deconstructing the myth of mogul Elon Musk. Saturday’s sketch did not try to resolve any of that. It did something more immediate: it made Musk the butt of a live, current joke, and Culhane made it look like a role he could keep playing.
For now, the clean read is that SNL found a Musk impression it may want to keep. Whether Culhane gets another shot will depend on whether the show keeps finding new ways to turn Musk’s own public theater against him.
