Here’s Why Beck Bennett Thinks Elon Musk Was A Worse ‘Saturday Night Live’ Host Than Donald Trump

Saturday Night Live alumnus Beck Bennett says that he had a much easier time working with now-President Donald Trump compared to the unfunny nightmare that Elon Musk brought to 30 Rockefeller Plaza. But Bennett should really just be grateful that he won’t be in the cast when Lorne Michaels inevitably books Peter Thiel on the show.

Throughout its storied 50-season run, Saturday Night Live’s slavish devotion to the zeitgeist has compelled Michaels to book a number of unsavory yet world-famous celebrities as hosts. In past eras of SNL (and American culture as a whole), this meant that Bob Odenkirk and Dana Carvey had to try and fail to find a way to make action movie superstar Steven Seagal seem funny and self-aware, but, during America’s dramatic shift to the far-right over the last decade, Michaels has moved on to inviting neo-fascist billionaire oligarchs to use SNL to launder their reputations and appeal to voters with facile and cowardly sketch “comedy.”

Bennett was lucky enough to bookend his time on the show with the worst two offenders of Michaels’ power-friendly hosting strategy, with Trump appearing on the show during Bennett’s inaugural season in 2015 and Musk stinking up the stage during Bennet’s last one in 2021. And, as Bennett explained during an interview on The Last Laugh Podcast, there really was a lesser of two evils between SNL hosts Trump and Musk. 

According to Bennett, Trump was a surly, lazy and aloof host who made the cast uncomfortable with his presence, but Musk was worse because the Tesla CEO was convinced that he was the funniest person in 30 Rockefeller Plaza — but at least SNL succeeded in stopping Musk from whipping his cock out. 

During the talk, Bennett recalled how “upset” Michaels’ choice in SNL host for that infamous week in 2015 made the entire cast and crew. “The week after we were all exhausted, felt kind of sick, just like, ‘Ugh, that was a lot to deal with,’” Bennett said of the aftermath from Trump’s hosting performance. Bennett also took some light jabs at President's competency as a comedic figure and literate human being, saying, “At the table read, he was having a little bit of trouble reading.”

As a host, Trump was predictably stubborn and non-collaborative. “He’d be like, ‘No, that’s what I said,’” Bennett recalled, although he ultimately found Trump’s pigheadedness to be less disruptive at SNL than it is in the White House. Bennett summarized of Trump’s hosting duties, “He was just kind of loafing around. It was just a lot to have him there. But he wasn’t particularly awful beyond that, I don’t think.”

“As far as having billionaire personalities come on the show, Elon Musk was a lot more offensive,” Bennett revealed. “That was harder to deal with.” 

While Trump may have been disinterested in the show, Musk treated SNL like it was the United States Treasury in terms of his aggressive, witless meddling. “He had very odd ideas, and he was very rude and less predictable to perform with,” Bennett said of Musk week at SNL. “In a way Trump was a little bit more like, ‘You tell me where to go and what to say, and I’ll tell you if I’m okay with that.’”

Bennett said that Musk believed himself to be a comedy genius and could turn caustic if the actual comedy professionals pushed back on his ideas, or if they pitched anything that wasn’t obsessively complimentary of their host. Chloe Fineman famously reported a similar experience from that week, accusing Musk of treating her “like you were firing me from Tesla” while she was trying to pitch ways for him to be funny for the first time in his life.

It’s ironic that Trump, who, for all his many faults and his ongoing fascist takeover of America, is usually good for a laugh either with or at him, couldn’t be bothered to be funny in an appropriate context. Meanwhile, Musk, who is so painfully unfunny that he had to buy Twitter and juice the algorithms just to make his stolen memes go viral, thought he could take over SNL and rule it as their comedy god-king before shitting out one of the most low-energy and joyless hosting performances in the show’s history.

We’ll probably never understand what was going through Michaels’ mind when he booked Musk back in 2021, but I do wonder if Musk ever tried to pitch the SNL don on selling him the title of “founder.”