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It’s Not Just Elon Musk—Here’s Every Billionaire Who Has Hosted ‘Saturday Night Live’

This article is more than 2 years old.

Donald Trump is gone, from both the White House and 30 Rock, so it’s no surprise that Lorne Michaels, who delivered some of Saturday Night Live’s best ratings in years with the jabs they heaped on America’s first billionaire president, would turn to a new hot-headed, ultra-rich bad boy for eyeballs. This time it’s Elon Musk. 

Musk—the aspiring martian, cofounder of Tesla TSLA and world’s third richest person with $166 billion— comes to the stage at 30 Rock with plenty of baggage, most of it carried by his 53 million-strong Twitter account: He’s dismissed the coronavirus and the vaccines; He’s picked fights with billionaires Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg; He drew the ire of the SEC with unchecked comments about Tesla’s electric car output. 

He’s not the first offbeat host to cause a stir but Musk is the first chosen simply because he’s a billionaire with a big Twitter following.

Billionaires Donald Trump, Michael Jordan, Oprah Winfrey and former Yankees owner George Steinbrenner—whose business-style was compared to Saddam Hussein and Idi Amin in one sketch—have hosted the show over the years, though Trump, who hosted in both 2004 and 2015, was the only one to have hosted while a member of the three-comma club. 

Billionaire musicians Jay-Z and Kanye West have been musical performers, while Michael Bloomberg, Giorgio Armani, Steven Speilberg and Mark Zuckerberg, who has been lampooned by the show several times, have made cameo appearances. (Steve Forbes also had a notable appearance alongside Rage Against the Machine in 1996 after his first unsuccessful presidential campaign). 

But Musk has no career in politics. He’s not an entertainer—or at least a professional one, as his 2018 SXSW performance indicates. He’s not a comedian—he recently referred to the show’s famous sketches as “skits.” He’s not an athlete. He is just very rich and very controversial, most recently for his claims about the coronavirus and vaccine, which have brought the NBC late night show a fresh round of backlash—and buzz—including an abundance of press about comments from the cast. Castmember Bowen Yang posted a frowning emoji and  critique of Musk on his Instagram stories. Castmember Aidy Bryant posted a screenshot to her Instagram stories of a Bernie Sanders’ Tweet calling it a “moral obscenity” that “the 50 wealthiest people in America today own more wealth than the bottom half of our people.”

Others were more generous.

“The show’s on 46 years and people still care about who’s being booked. I think that’s kind of dope,” coheadwriter Michael Che said on Wednesday’s Ellen DeGeneres Show. 

“I’m really excited, man,” castmember Pete Davidson said on Late Night with Seth Meyers, ahead of a dinner with Musk. “I’m gonna ask him for, like, a Tesla or some shit.”

All of that is to say that Michaels remains a master of the game more than four decades later. Previous episodes with billionaire hosts have fared well in the ratings.  West’s 2018 episode as a musical guest was one of the highest-rated season openers in years. 

And, as Trump said in his 2004 episode, parodying himself, “Nobody's bigger than me. Nobody's better than me. I'm a ratings machine." It turns out he got the last laugh—his episode during his presidential bid was the highest-rated show of the 2015-2016 season.

 Representatives for Saturday Night Live declined to comment.

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