Jimmy Kimmel joined a lot of other people in mocking Elon Musk on Thursday, and he had a lot of material to pull from. For instance, Musk’s SpaceX botched the test of a new rocket when it blew up just after launch. And meanwhile, Twitter finally removed all the blue checks from the accounts of people who refuse to pay $8 a month.
The reaction to that, Kimmel joked, proves that Twitter is “the only company that can embarrass you by admitting you pay for their product.”
During his monologue on Thursday’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” Kimmel first brought up that rocket explosion, joking after playing a clip that it was “the most expensive penis overcompensation in history.”
“The starship was in the air for about four minutes. Until multiple engines went out, and it blew up,” Kimmel continued, “which, for some reason elicited a big round of applause from the company.”
Kimmel mocked the unusual euphemism SpaceX used to describe the explosion — “rapid unscheduled disassembly” — joking that it was “the same thing that happened to Twitter when Elon Musk took over.”
“I have to hand it to them: ‘Rapid unscheduled disassembly’ is one hell of a way to describe your rocket blowing up. That’s up there with ‘wardrobe malfunction’ and ‘conscious uncoupling.’ But that disassembly cost SpaceX $3 billion. You could defame four different voting machine companies for that much money,” Kimmel said.
The host then moved on to what happened at Twitter.
“Today was the great de-checkening on Twitter. Basically, if you didn’t sign up for Elon’s eight-bucks-a-month plan by today, you lost your blue verification mark. Some of the world’s best and brightest had their checks taken away this morning,” Kimmel explained, “Including: His Holiness, Pope Francis; Her Holiness, Oprah; and somehow, I lost my blue check.”
“But Jimmy Fallon got to keep his blue check. I guess that means he’s the only real Jimmy now. I don’t know,” Kimmel went on. “And guess who else still has a check mark? You ready for this? OJ got to keep his check mark! I guess you don’t want to make him mad though, right?”
“I mean, this who-still-has-a-check thing is interesting because both Stephen King and LeBron James publicly said they would not pay for Twitter, and yet they still have their checkmarks,” Kimmel said. “And people are speculating now that Elon left their marks alone to shame those guys publicly. Which, this is the only company that can embarrass you by admitting you pay for their product. It’s really just Twitter and YouPorn — that’s it.”
Kimmel records his show earlier in the day so likely hadn’t confirmed when he taped that Musk admitted on Thursday afternoon that he gave James and King free Twitter Blue subscriptions. But only, of course, after it was discovered and, in King’s case, publicly complained about.
It sure looks like Musk attempted to make it look like two prominent critics of his plan had changed their minds. Weird. You can read more about that here.
And watch Kimmel’s entire monologue at the top of this page.