The recent “Saturday Night Live” cold open spoofed a reported clash between tech billionaire Elon Musk and Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
In the sketch, James Austin Johnson’s President Trump is in the Oval Office with Marcello Hernández’s Rubio, with the president telling his secretary of State that he “can’t have you fighting with Elon.”
“I need you to be my good ‘Little Marco,’” Trump says, referencing a nickname the president has used for Rubio in the past.
Rubio tells Trump in the sketch that he doesn’t support Musk “having total access to our government.”
“Planes are crashing, and he keeps trying to fire air traffic controllers,” he adds.
Mike Myers’s Elon Musk later enters the scene, with Trump telling the tech billionaire that he wishes “to thank you for at least wearing a suit this time.”
“Doesn’t look great, right? Billionaire but he at shops at Joseph A. Bank, it’s giving groomsman,” Trump states.
Rubio and Musk go after each other, with Trump in the middle and the president later proposing that “If you’re going to insult each other, at least make them good, okay?”
“Something like Elon, ‘How do you have 20 kids, but I’ve never seen you with a chick, just dudes named “donkey dong” and “boner king?”’… And here watch this, ‘Marco, short and gay,’ classy,” Trump states.
On Friday, The New York Times reported that Musk and Rubio clashed in a recent Cabinet meeting. According to the Times, Musk went after the secretary of State for not firing a large portion of the workforce at the State Department and said that he is only “good on TV.”
The Times reported that Rubio has been privately “furious,” with the tech billionaire for a while, especially following the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) taking on an effort to close down the U.S. Agency for International Development, which administers billions of dollars in humanitarian, security and development assistance in over 100 countries.
Amid the Cabinet meeting last week, Rubio pushed back. He said that Musk was not speaking the truth and asked if over 1,500 State Department workers who went into early retirement should be brought back so they could only be fired to count for layoffs, according to The Times.
Following Rubio and Musk’s going back-and-forth and tensions rising between the two, Trump waded in and defended his secretary of State.
The Hill has reached out to the White House and State Department for comment.
