By Variety | Created at 2025-03-20 16:27:23 | Updated at 2025-04-05 15:42:07
2 weeks ago
Jimmy Kimmel trolled Elon Musk during his March 19 monologue for trying to “drum up sympathy” amid a wave of Tesla owners burning and vandalizing their cars in protest of Musk. The Tesla founder appeared in an interview with Sean Hannity and blamed the Tesla protests on owners with “some kind of mental illness.”
“Tesla is a peaceful company,” Musk said. “I’ve never done anything awful. I think we just have a deranged… there is some kind of mental illness thing going on here. It doesn’t make any sense.”
“Well, let me see if I can explain it for you,” Kimmel fired back at Musk. “When you pull out a chainsaw to celebrate firing thousands of people, they get mad. My god. I mean, this poor guy. You do one, maybe two Nazi salutes, everybody gets all bent out of shape!”
Kimmel was referring to two of Musk’s most notorious moments as of late. The first is when he seemingly gave the Nazi salute during an inauguration event for Donald Trump last November. The second is when he waved a chainsaw around while on stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February. The chainsaw was an apparent metaphor for the work of the Department of Government Efficiency, which has been downsizing the federal workforce in its attempt to cut government spending.
“Here’s the thing, I get that people are upset,“ Kimmel wisecracked about the rise of burning Teslas. ”Burning a car might not be great for the environment. I don’t think that’s what they had in mind when they invented the electric car. In Las Vegas yesterday, someone threw a Molotov cocktail at a Tesla service center. At least five Teslas blew up, one from the Molotov and four because that’s just what Teslas do sometimes.”
“No one should be setting fires. You could kill somebody, you could hurt somebody,” he continued. “Elon Musk might not care about other people, but decent Americans should.”
Watch Kimmel’s full monologue in the video below.
