Musk booed by thousands on stage at show

A video of the event, which went viral online, ran on Twitter until the account posting it was deleted

ELON MUSK was booed by thousands of people at a Dave Chappelle comedy show in San Francisco yesterday. The world’s richest man was brought out on stage by the comedian, quickly causing the crowd to turn. “Cheers and boos, I see,” said Mr Chappelle, who himself has faced a public backlash over inflammatory jokes about transgender people.

Mr Chappelle then turned to Mr Musk, who recently bought Twitter and sacked half of its employees, and said: “It seems like some of the people you fired are in the audience.”

Mocking his own crowd, Mr Chappelle added: “Have you noticed one thing? All those people who are booing, and I’m just pointing out the obvious, they have terrible seats.”

It was an uncomfortable exchange, in which Mr Musk said “You weren’t expecting this were you?”

A video of the incident was posted on Twitter by a user called Cleo Patra and was shared widely. However, that account appears to have been deleted.

It is not clear if this was done by the user themselves, or by Twitter.

Mr Musk has been much more bullish about free speech on the social network, allowing Donald Trump, Jordan Peterson and Kanye West to return to the platform. West was then suspended because he told podcast host Alex Jones that he “loves Hitler”.

This weekend, Mr Musk himself caused controversy after accusing Dr Anthony Fauci of helping to spark the outbreak of the pandemic, calling for the man who was then America’s leading Covid official to be prosecuted for “lying” to Congress.

Mr Musk repeated a theory that Usfunded Chinese research into making viruses more deadly, a process known as “gain-of-function”, led to a coronavirus strain leaking from a laboratory in Wuhan and that became Covid-19.

“He (Fauci) lied to Congress and funded gain-of-function research that killed millions of people. Not awesome imo,” Mr Musk tweeted. “My pronouns are Prosecute/fauci,” he added, referring to the practice of indicating gender pronouns after one’s name. The tweet went viral and critics denounced Mr Musk as a “new far-right wing activist”.

The United States did give money to an organisation that worked with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, including a grant in 2014 to research possible coronaviruses from bats.

However, Dr Fauci has told Congress that the research was not related to “gain-of-function” and that it was “molecularly impossible” for the viruses being studied to have resulted in Covid-19.

There has also never been any clear evidence to suggest that Covid-19 leaked from a laboratory in Wuhan, the city where the virus was first detected.

In Right-wing circles, the Musk tweet’s reception was far more positive.

Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who had been removed from Twitter over Covid misinformation but whose account was reinstated under Musk’s ownership, tweeted: “I affirm your pronouns Elon.”