‘Oh Dear God!’ Jon Stewart Horrified by Eerie Elon Musk Theory

Jon Stewart winced in horror as writer Quinn Slobodian shared a theory on Elon Musk’s worldview after co-authoring a book about the tech billionaire.

Slobodian joined Stewart this week on The Weekly Show podcast where he discussed his book, Muskism, which is a deep-dive on Musk’s influence on tech, capitalism, the culture, and more.

According to the book’s synopsis: “Everyone’s got an Elon take. He’s a messiah. A menace; a genius; a clown. The verdicts differ, but they share one theme: they treat him as an individual. Muskism argues otherwise. Elon Musk isn’t a glitch in the system—he is the system. His worldview promises sovereignty through technology: plug in, power up, and become self-reliant. But the more you connect, the more he owns you.”

Slobodian and Stewart discussed Musk and his success compared to past business leaders like Henry Ford. At one point, Slobodian shared his thoughts on how Musk views the world as a “space that works from computers outward” and Stewart winced and threw his hands on his head as Slobodian explained further.

“Why does — do these industrial technocrats or whatever, all seem to flow into that ideology of diversity will destroy us?” Stewart asked.

“Well, I mean, Musk is kind of a unique one in that case because I would say that previous eras of industrialists often welcomed incoming immigrants as long as they met a kind of physical standard that could be, you know, useful human capital inside of their factories. But Musk comes to his way of thinking about those populations through his kind of computational lens. So you mentioned operating system earlier. It’s very much the way Musk sees the world,” Slobodian said.

He continued:

The world is a space that works from computers outward. He first got a programmable Commodore when he was a teenager, then he connected to the internet before he left South Africa, and ever since then he’s been seeing computers as a kind of control unit for reality. If you see society that way then when things happen that are against your material interests, you assume them to be either bugs or viruses or failed programming in the system that needs to be fixed.

“Oh, dear God,” a shocked Stewart responded.

Slobodian said his theory could be seen playing out clearly when Musk would describe his previous work with the federal government and DOGE.

“He said not only that he was reprogramming the matrix, but that he was in there to get rid of the bugs, the viruses, the bots and the and the non-player characters, the NPCs, right? So illegal immigrants, people who we perceive to be somehow in a great replacement theory kind of way, acting as the permanent voting base for the Democratic Party, are kind of offline computer viruses who need to be identified and removed,” the author said.

Slobodian added that Musk’s ownership of X also creates a “closed ecosystem” for the billionaire. He made Stewart laugh when he revealed he has a burner account that only follows Musk.

“[X] has this little feature called, it has a feature called Today’s News. And it tells you what apparently today’s news is. Yesterday, you know what today’s was? There were two items. One is Musk questions whether colonialism made Africa poorer. That was the first headline. The second headline was Argentine President Javier Milei praises Musk’s battle on the woke mind virus,” the author said.

“Oh my,” a still-shocked Stewart responded.

“He wants to create a communications ecosystem in which only those most dogmatic kind of Pravda-like talking points can be repeated back to him,” Slobodian said.

Stewart and Musk have targeted each other with insults in the past, both describing the other as propagandists in March after Musk took issue with Stewart’s criticizing him and the influence he can have on elections.

“Jon Stewart is an extremely skilled propagandist disguised as a truth-teller,” Musk wrote on X at the time, adding Stewart is also a “great comedian.”

“Elon Musk is an extremely skilled propagandist,” Stewart replied.

“Not as good as you! Stop being so humble,” Musk shot back.

Stewart wrapped up the back-and-forth by inviting Musk on the podcast.

“Come on the show!! We’ll talk about how self deprecating we both are!!” he wrote.

Watch above via The Weekly Show.

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