Elon Musk has spoken out amid claims he made Chloe Fineman cry on the set of Saturday Night Live.
In a now-deleted TikTok post, the 36-year-old comedian said the Tesla CEO upset her when he hosted the comedy sketch series in 2021. According to Fineman, she had pulled an all-nighter during the week Musk was hosting the show. When she presented her sketch to Musk, he allegedly critiqued her writing and told her he wasn’t the least bit amused.
“You made I, Chloe Fineman, burst into tears because I stayed up all night writing a sketch. I was so excited,” she said in the video. “I came in, I asked if you had any questions, and you stared at me like you were firing me from Tesla and were like, ‘It’s not funny.’”
Fineman initially thought the SpaceX owner was joking, and waited for him to say he actually loved the sketch. Instead, Musk further criticized her work.
“I waited for you to be like, ‘Haha, JK.’ No. Then you started pawing through my script, flipping each page, being like, ‘I didn’t laugh once. Not one time,’” she said.
One day after Fineman shared and deleted the video from her TikTok page, Musk took to X/Twitter to indirectly address her accusations. The billionaire businessman offered his side of the story, without calling out Fineman for bringing their alleged conversation online.
“Frankly, it was only on the Thursday before the Saturday that ANY of the sketches generated laughs. I was worried,” Musk wrote on November 12.
“I was like damn my SNL appearance is going to be so f***ing unfunny that it will make a crackhead sober,” he said. “But then it worked out in the end.”
Musk also responded to one X/Twitter user who wrote about Fineman: “She’s a professional comedy writer who cries when someone doesn’t think her jokes are funny? That’s funny.”
“Seriously,” Musk replied, along with a straight face amoji.
On November 9, SNL sarcastically praised the results of the 2024 U.S. election, which saw Donald Trump defeat Vice President Kamala Harris, in its first post-election show. During the cold open, comedian Dana Carvey impersonated the tech tycoon jumping for joy in a “Make America Great Again” hat, much like he did at Trump’s October 5 rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.
“Check it out, dark MAGA,” Carvey said, flailing his arms in the air and pointing to his hat.
While many fans found Carvey’s take on Musk to be frighteningly accurate, Musk was once again not amused. Under a clip from the show on X/Twitter, he wrote: “Dana Carvey just sounds like Dana Carvey.”
Musk also said: “They are so mad that @realDonaldTrump won.”
Fineman’s claims come after fellow cast member Bowen Yang revealed on Watch What Happens Live that one former host made “multiple” castmates cry before the table read “because he hated the ideas.”
At the time, Yang did not reveal who the SNL host was.