“A messiah complex”: John Oliver calls out Elon Musk’s wild year on “Last Week Tonight”

“Last Week Tonight” aired its final show of the year on Sunday so understandably, host John Oliver had to end things on a grand note: “This is our final show of the year, so we thought we’d focus on someone who’s had a pretty big 12 months.”

Oliver’s topic of the night was Elon Musk — the owner of SpaceX, Tesla, X (formerly Twitter), The Boring Company, Neuralink and xAI — who the late-night talk show host slammed as “a man who can pull off pretty much any bad guy in a movie.”

“There’s Lex Luthor posing for the cover of Metropolis Maniacs Monthly. There’s ‘Why no, Mr. Bond, I and my child’s bride expect you to die,’” Oliver continued while listing the many “bad guys” that he said Musk resembles. “There’s ‘I just bought your media company and I’m about to strip you for parts.’ There’s space’s first racist sheriff and, finally, the less f**k-able reimagining of Billy Zane’s character in ‘Titanic.’ Truly, the man has range.”

Oliver added that Musk has been an infamous figure in the news this year “from test launching the most powerful rocket ever built to just this week having to recall 2 million cars due to safety concerns.” He also made jabs at Musk squaring off with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Musk tweeting his agreement with an antisemitic post, Musk attacking companies who said they’d pull their ads off X and Musk boasting that he’d “done more for the environment than . . . any single human on Earth.

“The least surprising thing on Earth is a middle-aged billionaire CEO with self-serving libertarian views, increasingly racist politics and a messiah complex,” Oliver said. “And it is long past time that he faced the kind of accountability that should come with that.”

Watch the “Last Week Tonight” segment below, via YouTube.