SNL’s Grok Roast Turns a Musk Chatbot on Its Owner
Saturday Night Live cast member Jeremy Culhane debuted a new impression of Elon Musk on Weekend Update in the show’s November 7, 2026 episode. In the sketch, Culhane’s Musk is awkward and visibly eager to befriend the hosts. The segment is built around Grok, the chatbot, which Musk’s character asks to perform “an epic vulgar roast of me, Elon Musk.” (TechCrunch)
The Grok character obliged. It describes Musk as “the worst thing South Africa has ever done” and tells him “Maybe if you have 100 more kids, one of them will talk to you.” Culhane also plays Musk as a stutterer, according to Yahoo Entertainment’s coverage, which describes the performance as a harsh takedown.
Co-host Colin Jost sets up the political material. He questions Musk about moving to Texas to avoid California Democrats and taxes, about building his own town, and about now facing Democrats running Texas. Deadline characterized the sketch as a postmortem of the midterm elections, and Variety reported the segment as a roast of Musk over his midterms defeat.
The sketch’s central joke is a chatbot that Musk owns turning on him.
The sketch is the latest in a long run of Musk portrayals on the program. Mike Myers has played him repeatedly. In one earlier appearance he wielded a chainsaw before freezing and muttering “Glitch!” Myers returned on March 1, 2025, in a cold open satirizing Trump and Vance’s meeting with Zelenskyy, and he appeared again as Musk in the January 2026 Trump Awards cold open. Mikey Day performed a Musk impression in a Billionaire Star Trek sketch featuring Jeff Bezos. Myers also sold self-vandalizing Teslas, including a Tesla Model-V, in an April 2025 tariff cold open. SNL’s official YouTube channel lists a video titled “Weekend Update: Elon Musk on His Tough Week After Midterms - SNL.”
Other cast members have aimed at the technology sector this season as well. Jane Wickline played Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei as a stuttering prophet of AI doom, and James Austin Johnson caricatured Kevin O’Leary as a data center backer responding to data center backlash. The November 7 cold open also included a surprise cameo by Texas Senator-elect James Talarico during a Donald Trump rant.
The broader context here is that satire of AI has moved from abstraction to specific products and named executives. A sketch only lands if the audience already knows its target, whether that is a model’s persona, a company’s output, or a data center fight in a particular town. Grok working as the straight man, the calm foil who sets up the jokes, suggests the chatbot has become a recognizable public character in its own right.
In my view, the more interesting question for people who build and deploy these systems is what it means when a product’s persona becomes a comedy writer’s raw material. Satire of this kind tends to reflect how the public perceives a tool, and a tool’s tone and guardrails are now part of that perception. Whether that feedback loop is useful to the companies involved is a judgment each reader can make. The sketch is a reminder that a conversational model’s output is read by a wide audience, not only by the person who typed the prompt.
