Boos, cheers welcome Musk to the stage at Chappelle show

New Twitter owner Elon Musk was greeted by boos and cheers in a surprise appearance at Dave Chappelle’s stand-up show Sunday night in San Francisco.

The comedian was performing at the Chase Center when he said “ladies and gentlemen, make some noise for the richest man in the world,” prompting Mr. Musk to join him on stage, according to a video of the moment shared on social media.

A mix of cheers and jeers rang out from the over 18,000-seat arena as the tech magnate, who was wearing an “I love Twitter” shirt, waved to the crowd.

Turns out Twitter can, in fact, be real life. https://t.co/FFpups1yEy pic.twitter.com/41jcZgdDR4

— Steven Goffman (@SteveGoffman) December 12, 2022

Mr. Musk asked the comedian “you weren’t expecting this, were you?” as the boos started to crescendo from the San Francisco crowd. Mr. Chappelle quipped “sounds like some of those people you fired are in the audience.”

The comedian let the noise simmer down again before he said “all those people that are booing — and I’m just pointing out the obvious — you have terrible seats.”

He then began riffing on Mr. Musk’s interest in space before the Twitter owner thanked Mr. Chappelle for having him on stage.

“Are you kidding? I wouldn’t miss this opportunity,” he replied before joking “the first comedy club on Mars should be mine. A deal’s a deal, Musk.”

Returning to addressing the boos, Mr. Chappelle said “Do you hear that sound Elon? That’s the sound of pending civil unrest.”

He closed out the show by advising the crowd that they can do something better with their life than boo Mr. Musk, and then wished everyone well.

Multiple outlets reported that Twitter had either suspended accounts that posted clips of Mr. Musk’s onstage appearance or the tweets were deleted by the owners, including from CNBC and Deadline.

Videos of Mr. Musk and Mr. Chappelle sharing the stage are still available on Twitter and on YouTube.

“Technically, it was 90% cheers & 10% boos (except during quiet periods), but, still, that’s a lot of boos, which is a first for me in real life (frequent on Twitter),” Mr. Musk tweeted Monday morning in response to the crowd reaction.

“It’s almost as if I’ve offended SF’s unhinged leftists … but nahhh,” he concluded.

Technically, it was 90% cheers & 10% boos (except during quiet periods), but, still, that’s a lot of boos, which is a first for me in real life (frequent on Twitter).

It’s almost as if I’ve offended SF’s unhinged leftists … but nahhh.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 12, 2022

Twitter’s boss has had an eventful tenure ever since he took over the social media giant in late October.

On Sunday, he tweeted that his pronouns were “Prosecute/Fauci,” in reference to the White House’s former COVID-19 adviser, Dr. Anthony Fauci.

He’s also been running a journalistic mini-series called the “Twitter Files” — exposés into how the company dealt with the Hunter Biden laptop story ahead of the 2020 election, how it worked to suppress engagement for accounts that leaned conservative and the process Twitter used to remove then-President Donald Trump from the platform. 

Nearly 5,000 employees have left the company in a mix of layoffs and resignations, according to Bloomberg News.

One of those people who resigned was the site’s former head of security, Yoel Roth, who Mr. Musk criticized over the weekend by saying that Mr. Roth advocated for child sexualization in his doctoral thesis at the University of Pennsylvania.

The doctoral thesis was called  “Gay Data,” and discussed ways to improve the LGBTQ dating app Grindr, including providing improved access to minors. It was published in 2016.

However, the dissertation was briefly unavailable for public viewing following Mr. Musk’s criticism.

“On December 10, access to the dissertation of University of Pennsylvania graduate Yoel Roth, Ph.D., was mistakenly closed off on Scholarly Commons, one of the two digital sites on which dissertations by Penn doctoral graduates can be publicly accessed,” Ron Ozio, director of media relations, told Fox News Digital.