It's Clear That 'Team America: World Police' Flew Right Over Elon Musk's Head

This week, Twitter users rediscovered Elon Musk's list of five songs that he finds inspirational, leading us to question whether Musk would prefer less nuanced tunes like “The Wheels on the Bus” or “Old MacDonald.”

In 2004, South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone released their most painstaking project to date, the satirical puppet musical movie Team America: World Police. Through a grueling experiment in practical effects and marionette manipulation, Parker and Stone skewered American hyper-nationalism at the height of the War on Terror while saving some mockery for our sanctimonious movie stars and the terrible movies they make – Pearl Harbor, in particular, absolutely sucked.

However, as is the case any time Parker and Stone execute on some not-particularly-subtle satire, many fans of Team America took the movie the wrong way, and its most popular track, “America, Fuck Yeah,” has become a bit of an anthem among the uncritical conservative masses who never stopped to consider that they, themselves, could be Parker and Stone’s parody targets.

In 2011, long before his hard-right turn, Musk guest DJed for the Los Angeles-based radio station KCRW, sharing five songs that inspired him – a list that now inspires his haters to question his media literacy.

“That is from the movie, Team America. I’m a big fan of South Park," Musk explained of the strange pick before making a comment that aged about as well as Apartheid: "The shows that I watch — South Park, Daily Show and Colbert Report — those are sort of my main three ones — they just capture a little bit of essence of America in both a good and a bad way.”

In the 14 years since Musk made these picks, clearly, he's drifted away from his center-to-center-left TV habits and abandoned any attempt to see nuance in the American identity. Back when Team America first came out, the idea that the richest man on the planet could infiltrate our most important institutions and make unchecked changes to critical government functions, as Musk did during his DOGE experiment, would be as laughable as having Kim Jong-il sing a cover of Bobby Vinton's 1962 single “Mr. Lonely” – which, in 2025, would probably find a place on Musk's top five.