Jimmy Kimmel has little sympathy for Tesla CEO Elon Musk, even when his cars are being lit on fire.
“His sales are down, his stock is down,” Kimmel said in his Wednesday monologue. “Last night, he was somber as he went through this with Sean Hannity.”
Kimmel played a Fox News clip of Musk in an interview with Hannity, acting confused about the nationwide Tesla vandalism.
Musk speculated that people were vandalizing Teslas because of “some kind of mental illness thing going on here,” but Kimmel had a different theory:
“Well, let me see if I can explain it for you,” Kimmel told Musk, “When you pull out a chainsaw to celebrate firing thousands of people, they get mad."
“My God,” Kimmel added. “I mean, this poor guy. You do one, maybe two Nazi salutes, everybody gets all bent out of shape!"
Kimmel’s advice to Musk comes amidst a wave of right-wing backlash to a joke in his Tuesday monologue. Kimmel told viewers, “Please don’t vandalize Tesla,” but followed it up with a pause that implied he was actually cool with it.
The joke led some in MAGA circles to accuse Kimmel of trying to incite domestic terrorism. Kimmel did not directly respond to the claims in his latest monologue, but he did clarify his stance on the issue.
“Here’s the thing, I get that people are upset,“ Kimmel said. ”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,” Kimmel continued. “At least five Teslas blew up, one from the Molotov and four because that’s just what Teslas do sometimes.”
The late-night host concluded, “No one should be setting fires. You could kill somebody, you could hurt somebody. Elon Musk might not care about other people, but decent Americans should.”
