Recently, Tesla CEO and aspiring edgelord Elon Musk purchased a 9.2 percent stake in Twitter after complaining about the social media platform’s “censorship” policies.
Musk, who boasts 81.5 million followers on the social media site at time of writing, then became the largest single shareholder of Twitter—a site where he’d infamously branded a heroic diver a “pedo,” threatened Tesla workers against unionizing, and posted a transphobic meme following reports that his ex, Grimes, was dating trans whistleblower Chelsea Manning.
On Tuesday night, The Daily Show’s Trevor Noah—who, like Musk, hails from South Africa (though his family didn’t own an emerald mine)—weighed in on the recent activity of the “billionaire businessman and proud African American.”
ADVERTISEMENT
“One of Musk’s favorite things to do is get high and post troll-y memes on Twitter. But recently, he transformed himself into the most powerful Twitter troll of all time,” Noah explained. “You see, Musk recently bought enough stock to make himself the company’s largest shareholder. And apparently, he was supposed to join the board of directors as well, but now for some reason, there’s been a change of plans.”
Yes, Musk declined to join the board of directors. If he had, the richest man in the world would have been limited to owning just 14.9 percent of the company’s stock. Now, some are predicting that he could gobble up more Twitter shares and increase his financial control of the company.
“And look, I know a lot of people don’t like Elon Musk, they think he’s controversial, all these things,” said Noah. “I will say this: One thing you have to admit is he makes being a billionaire look fun. It has its perks. Elon was annoyed by Twitter, so what did he do? He bought it. Yeah. Tell me we all wish we didn’t have that power, huh? Imagine if, when the airline told you that you were bumped from your flight, you could just buy the airline.”
While this all may seem “fun” to Noah, according to Musk’s ex Grimes, he “wouldn’t even get a new mattress” and preferred to live in “a very insecure $40,000 house” while “eating peanut butter for eight days in a row.”
Furthermore, Twitter investors are planning a class-action lawsuit against Musk for being 11 days late in notifying financial regulators that he’d acquired a large stake in the company, which allegedly saved him $143 million.
