Elon Musk was booed on stage for several minutes at a comedy show in San Francisco on Sunday after spending the weekend attacking former Twitter Inc. employees and outgoing top U.S. medical adviser Anthony Fauci.
Many in attendance to see Dave Chappelle at Chase Center — which has capacity for more than 18,000 — broke out into jeers as soon as the comedian asked them to “make some noise for the richest man in the world.”
“Cheers and boos, I see,” Chappelle said as Musk, 51, waved and paced around on stage in footage later posted on YouTube. After the two raised their hands in reaction to the reception for the billionaire, the comedian quipped: “It sounds like some of them people you fired are in the audience.”
The billionaire has dismissed thousands of employees from San Francisco-based Twitter since closing his US$44 billion acquisition of the company six weeks ago. Over the weekend, he accused his predecessors of running it “as a Democratic Party activist machine” and agreed with a follower who said Twitter’s handling of former president Donald Trump’s tweets amounted to election interference.
In other posts, Musk baselessly suggested that Yoel Roth, the former head of Twitter’s trust and safety division, is an advocate for sexualizing children, and wrote that the company is “both a social media company and a crime scene.” He made fun of gender pronouns and called for Fauci to be prosecuted in a post, and claimed the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases has lied to Congress. The U.S. has debunked that.
Musk’s tweeting has been turning off some would-be buyers of Tesla Inc.’s electric cars, and his acquisition of Twitter has dragged on the valuation of the company from which he derives most of his $175.2 billion fortune. Tesla shares slumped as much as 5% on Monday and are down about 52% this year.
Musk tweeted hours after his public appearance that the crowd’s reaction was “90% cheers & 10% boos,” but said it was the first time he’s been booed in person.
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