Jimmy Kimmel has fired back at Elon Musk after he called the late-night host an “insufferable nonsense propaganda puppet.”
On Thursday (November 7) night’s episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live!, the host, 56, shared that he had heard from a lot of people about the results of the 2024 presidential election.
“But none more prominent than the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, who this morning, tweeted ‘Kimmel is an insufferable nonsense propaganda puppet,’” the comedian read aloud.
“At least my children like me, you know,” Kimmel retorted, referencing Musk’s estranged 20-year-old transgender daughter Vivian, who spoke out against her father in July, calling him an “absent father.”
“The guy who paid people a million dollars a day to vote for Donald Trump is calling me a propaganda puppet,” he said incredulously. “Listen, Kermit: You bought Twitter, you bought a social media platform, that is literally a propaganda machine.
“Let me tell you something,” he continued, “if I spent two weeks trying to come up with a four-word description of Elon Musk, I don’t think I could do better than ‘insufferable nonsense propaganda puppet.’”
Kimmel went on to share a slew of tweets in which Musk accused several major news outlets, including The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Associated Press, of pushing propaganda.
“Everything is propaganda to Elon Musk,” he added.
Musk, who has donated $75m to the President-elect’s campaign, is expected to join Trump’s administration.
During an October appearance on Fox News, Trump teased a potential role for the Tesla CEO.
“He’s a great business guy, and he’s a great cost-cutter,” the Republican said during a Sunday Morning Futures interview. “And he [Musk] said, ‘I could cut costs without affecting anybody.’”
Trump clarified that Musk has said he “doesn’t want to be in the Cabinet. He just wants to be in charge of cost-cutting.”
“We’ll have a new position: Secretary of Cost-Cutting. Elon wants to do that, and we have incredible people. He’s running a big business. He can’t just say, ‘I think I’ll go into the Cabinet.’ Other people can. He can’t, but Elon’s a little bit different in that sense,” he said.
Following his 2024 presidential win, Trump gave a special shoutout to Musk in his victory speech. “He’s a character, he’s a special guy, he’s a super genius,” Trump praised of the X Corp owner, before saying: “We have to protect our geniuses, we don’t have that many of them.”
