On Saturday, May 8, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk hosted Saturday Night Live on NBC. The show often features actors, comedians, athletes, and entertainers as hosts. Musk was the first SNL host to not fall into any of those categories. The announcement of his episode brought a lot of controversy and debate. 

Musk’s net worth is 157.2 billion dollars and is growing every second. He is the CEO of SpaceX, CEO and product architect of Tesla Inc., and founder of The Boring Company. He is trying to make Mars habitable for humans and plans on creating a mission there soon. His actions as CEO of many different companies bring criticism. While he is recognized as a genius, there are allegations that he does not provide for his employees and that his working conditions are less than favorable. He is also the creator of a very popular cryptocurrency called Dogecoin, which started as a joke. Dogecoin is his most recent endeavor and is gaining a lot of traffic through social media, as Elon jokes about it on Twitter. Viewers and crypto investors expected Dogecoin’s price to change as he hosted SNL. 

The show began with Musk telling the audience that he is the first person with Asperger’s to host SNL. The cast moved into a segment for Mother’s Day and then carried on with their sketches, almost all of them involving Musk. The reviews were mixed, but that was to be expected. Liz Scavuzzo, a sophomore at Pennridge High School, says, “I thought the episode was a mess. They used Elon as a representation for the wrong generation as an attempt to connect our humor to their show which did not work.” This seems to be a common opinion between those who disliked the episode. The show tried to make Musk relatable, which is impossible. Additionally, when asked about her opinion on Musk himself, Scavuzzo says, “I’m mixed on him; I love Tesla’s brand, how he values the environment and he’s a great businessman. I don’t like how he operates with his family; His ex-wife said that he treated her like an employee which doesn’t settle right with me.” This aligns with the commonly held issue with the episode which is that he should not be on Saturday Night Live because he is a bad person. Scavuzzo’s thoughts on SNL’s choice to have Musk on the show is, “I think they had a good choice with Elon, just executed it wrong as they do most episodes. I already don’t think highly of them though.”

After the show’s conclusion, Twitter users were going crazy. Some thought that the episode was hilarious, others thought that it was cringy. A lot of people enjoyed seeing Musk’s partner Grimes appear in the last sketch. The episode was definitely worth watching, just for the experience if not for the comedy. Maybe the most interesting part of the episode was that Dogecoin’s price dropped by 30 percent after Musk made multiple jokes about the cryptocurrency. When he compared the currency to a “hustle” the worth dropped down to 49 cents. Love him or hate him, he is doing newsworthy things in technology, and now comedy.