For the latest installment of its long-running “Dailyshowography” series of short films on “great men,” The Daily Show enlisted a very special narrator.
“What do you think of when you think of the future?” actor William Shatner asks at the top of this exclusive segment from Tuesday night’s episode as images of rockets, robots and “cybertrucks” appear on the screen.
Over the next several minutes, Shatner helps make the case that Musk might actually be the “supervillain” his biggest detractors fear him to be. The piece traces the Tesla “Technoking’s” origin story as a young kid who “overcame many hardships, although unlike other South African celebrities, he didn’t make his childhood into a whole thing,” referring to Trevor Noah’s backstory.
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“Like so many tech entrepreneurs, he earned his unimaginable wealth by doing something invaluable for society,” Shatner says dryly. “Selling a start-up you’ve never heard of to a company that doesn’t exist anymore.”
The narrator goes on to mock Musk for having a “mid-life crisis” in his twenties by crashing his million-dollar “supercar” and starting a record label to release his own EDM track. “A banger all the more impressive considering Musk had clearly never heard music before,” he says. “Yes, Elon Musk refuses to stay in his lane, much like a Tesla on auto-pilot.”
By the end of the scathing video, Shatner reviews all of the ways Musk has used Twitter to promise to make the world a “better place” with absolutely zero follow-through.
“And when a Thai soccer team was stuck in a cave, Elon even promised to rescue those kids…from the guy who rescued them!” he says. “That’s why Musk is such a champion of free speech. If you can’t randomly accuse someone who’s saving people’s lives of being a ‘pedo guy,’ does civil discourse even exist?”
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