On Last Week Tonight, John Oliver drew parallels between Elon Musk‘s Department of Government Efficiency to the ill-fated and shoddy Willy Wonka immersive expertise within the U.Ok., which shortly grew to become a viral sensation as the most important occasion ripoff/mishap for the reason that Fyre Competition.
Oliver started the episode by criticizing the newly fashioned contracted group as having “no thought what they’re doing,” pointing to an instance the place head Elon Musk mistakenly acknowledged that its haphazard slashing of federal spending has resulted in $55 billion in whole estimated financial savings.
Following the inaccurate announcement, reporters uncovered a flurry of caveats and calculations that led to the oversight and inflated the quantity. As NPR estimated, the financial savings truly amounted closer to $2 billion, which Oliver quipped was “quite a lot of numbers away” from the initially touted determine.
“In reality, there hasn’t been such a stark disconnect between advertising and actuality because it turned out the Glasgow Wonka Expertise was truly this,” he mentioned, flashing an image from the occasion that took the web by storm in February 2024, that includes a picture of a downtrodden-looking, green-haired lady surrounded by beakers and a cloud of smoke.
“Proper now, we’re all her,” Oliver joked.
Earlier in this system, Oliver additionally mocked Musk’s weird chainsaw show at CPAC, by which he celebrated DOGE’s gutting of presidency jobs by whipping across the energy instrument at random.
“I’m not legally allowed to say what I wish to occur there, however I can and am considering it actually exhausting proper now,” he mentioned. “However a chainsaw would possibly truly be a reasonably apt metaphor for DOGE on condition that Musk’s slicing swiftly and with out quite a lot of precision. The federal government’s repeatedly needed to scramble to rent workers they all of the sudden realized had been important. On Monday, we realized they had been attempting to rent greater than 300 employees tasked with managing America’s nuclear weapons. Then on Tuesday, the USDA mentioned it accidentally fired employees who’re engaged on the federal authorities’s response to the avian flu outbreak.”
