The SNL Guest Host That Made Chloe Fineman Cry

“Saturday Night Live” star Chloe Fineman, known for her impressions of pop culture figures like Jennifer Coolidge, Britney Spears, and JoJo Siwa, opened up in a (now-deleted) TikTok about the fact that Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk made a bunch of cast members cry when he hosted the late-night institution in 2021. (Suffice it to say, Musk did not make our ranking of the 10 best “Saturday Night Live” guest hosts.)

“OK, I just saw some news article about Elon Musk being like butt-hurt over ‘SNL’ and his impression, but I’m like you’re clearly watching the show, like what are you talking about?” Fineman said in the clip (via The Hollywood Reporter). “And I’m like, you know what? I’m gonna come out and say at long last that I’m the castmember that he made cry. And he’s the host that made someone cry.”

To clarify, the mystery surrounding the “host that made someone cry” actually started a little while ago thanks to Fineman’s fellow cast member Bowen Yang, who appeared on Bravo’s “Watch What Happens Live” with his “Las Culturistas” cohost Matt Rogers in August 2024. “This man — this person — this host made multiple castmembers cry on Wednesday before the table read because he hated the ideas,” Yang told Cohen at the time during a game called “Truth or Kink.”

Apparently, Musk’s criticism of the latest “SNL” episode (more on that shortly) riled Fineman up, and she felt emboldened to confront the issue. “And I was like, I’m not gonna say anything,” the actor continued. “But I’m like, no, if you’re gonna go on your platform [X] and be rude, guess what? You made I, Chloe Fineman, burst into tears because I stayed up late writing a sketch. I was so excited, I came in, I asked if you had any questions and you stared at me like you were firing me from Tesla and were like, ‘It’s not funny.'” (For what it’s worth, Fineman did an impression of Musk on the word “funny,” and it was pretty accurate.)

Chloe Fineman’s now-gone TikTok also revealed that Elon Musk took his critique of her sketch really far, going as far as to flip through the script to prove to her that it stunk. “I waited for you to be like, ‘Ha ha, [just kidding],'” Fineman continued. “No, then you started pawing through my script, like flipping each page, being, like, ‘I didn’t laugh once, not one time.'” Without naming the specific sketch, Fineman said that it did run in the episode “and it was fine,” even complimenting Musk’s performance: “I actually had a really good time and I thought you were really funny in it. But, you know. Have a little manners here … sir.”

Musk — who, like his new best friend Donald Trump, is terminally online and loves firing back at people about how he’s perceived — posted on his platform X to respond to Fineman’s allegations. “Frankly, it was only on the Thursday before the Saturday that ANY of the sketches generated laughs,” he wrote in the post. “I was worried. I was like damn my ‘SNL’ appearance is going to be so f***ing unfunny that it will make a crackhead sober!! But then it worked out in the end.” Putting aside the analogy of something being so “unfunny” that it “will make a crackhead sober,” the truth is that, in this writer’s estimation, Musk’s episode of “Saturday Night Live” is bad. The guy is absolutely, stunningly devoid of charisma and comedic timing, and watching him bumble through sketches with a clownish grin on his face is a wholly unpleasant experience. At least someone had the idea to dress him in a Wario costume to make him look like an absolute tool.

The only reason Chloe Fineman is putting Elon Musk on blast about being a huge jerk while he hosted “Saturday Night Live” is because he commented on the most recent episode — likely (definitely) because it made fun of him. In the first episode after the 2024 presidential election, in which former president and convicted felon Donald Trump won the race over Vice President Kamala Harris, the late-night show debuted its newest take on Elon Musk — with veteran performer Dana Carvey poking fun at Musk. (Throughout Trump’s campaign, Elon Musk has spent a truly inordinate amount of time showing up at rallies to jump up and down on the stage and show his belly to everyone, which is what Carvey did before James Austin Johnson’s “ripped Trump” emerged onto the stage.)

After the episode — hosted by Bill Burr — aired, an X user posted a clip of Carvey’s Musk impression asking if anyone thought it was funny. Naturally, Musk himself responded. “‘SNL’ has been dying slowly for years, as they become increasingly out of touch with reality,” the apparent humor expert declared before reinvigorating the claim that NBC violated the “equal time provision” for presidential candidates by including Vice President Harris in the cold open one week prior. (Her appearance did not violate any actual rules, yet the network gave commercial time to Trump as a result.)

“Saturday Night Live” airs Saturday nights at 11:30 P.M. EST, unless Trump and Musk do something about that after the former takes office in January 2025.