Jimmy Kimmel came out swinging against Elon Musk, after the tech billionaire slammed him on social media following the election.
On Wednesday night, Kimmel reacted to Donald Trump’s win over Kamala Harriswith an emotional monologue in which he got noticeably choked up. The speech went viral, prompting a reaction from Musk on X, the platform he purchased formerly known as Twitter, writing, “Kimmel is an insufferable nonsense propaganda puppet.”
Thursday, Kimmel issued a response to Musk on his talk show.
“Last night, I shared some of my thoughts and feelings about what happened and how much I’m gonna miss democracy … and I heard from a lot of people about it but none more prominent than the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, who this morning tweeted, ‘Kimmel is an insufferable nonsense propaganda puppet,'” Kimmel explained.
He then deadpanned, “At least my children like me” — before turning Musk’s words against him.
“The guy who paid people $1 million a day to vote for Donald Trump is calling me a propaganda puppet. Listen, Kermit, you bought Twitter, you bought a social media platform that is literally a propaganda machine,” he said. “If I spent two weeks trying to come up with a four-word description of Elon Musk, I don’t think I could do better than ‘insufferable nonsense propaganda puppet.'”
Kimmel then pointed out how Musk calls “everything” propaganda, pulling up old posts in which he used that term to refer to the New York Times, Washington Post, NPR and even the Associated Press.
Digging deeper, Kimmel also pulled up an old post Trump shared about Elon on his Truth Social platform, in which Trump said that when Musk visited the White House he kept “asking me for help on all of his many subsidized projects, whether it’s electric cars that don’t drive long enough, driverless cars that crash, or rocketships to nowhere.”
Claiming Musk told him “how he was a big Trump fan and Republican,” Trump added, “I could have said, ‘Drop to your knees and beg,’ and he would have done it.”
“You know what he means by beg,” Kimmel then quipped, before adding, “I’m sure his little hand will fit nicely in your sock hole.”
Musk has not yet responded to Kimmel’s latest comments.
