Grok Roasts Musk on Saturday Night Live

Elon Musk's AI chatbot Grok turned its wit on Musk during a Saturday Night Live segment after his backed candidates lost in the 2026 midterms.

Updated on Nov. 8, 2026 in Artificial Intelligence

Elon Musk's AI chatbot Grok roasted Musk on Saturday Night Live, with featured player Jeremy Culhane portraying Musk on Weekend Update. The segment followed midterm elections in which most candidates Musk backed lost.

Why it matters

Musk spent hundreds of millions of dollars supporting GOP candidates in the 2026 midterms, and the losses came as shares in his businesses dropped. The segment highlights how Musk's own AI product can be turned against him in public.

Musk's spending on midterm candidates reached hundreds of millions of dollars, but the extraction does not provide a precise total or the number of races involved. The segment's use of the Grok chatbot to generate roasts raises open questions about how such outputs are constrained.

The players

Elon Musk

Elon Musk is the billionaire founder and leader of several major companies, including Tesla and xAI, and a prominent political donor.

Grok

Grok is an AI chatbot developed by Musk's company xAI, known for a more irreverent conversational style.

Saturday Night Live

Saturday Night Live is the long-running NBC sketch comedy series known for political satire and impressions of public figures.

Jeremy Culhane

Jeremy Culhane is a featured player on Saturday Night Live who portrayed Musk on Weekend Update.

The details

On Weekend Update, Culhane portrayed Musk and asked the Grok AI chatbot to roast him, which it did with what the segment presented as vulgar, epic material. Culhane ended the bit by telling Grok to shut down, while jokes referenced Musk moving to Texas to avoid taxes and the Texas town he built now being run by Democrats.

November 3, 2026: Midterm elections, in which Musk-backed candidates lost.
November 7, 2026: The SNL Weekend Update segment featuring the Grok roast aired.

Tech Race

The segment shows a consumer AI chatbot being used in a public comedic context to mock its own creator, a dynamic that differs from earlier SNL portrayals of Musk built on his statements alone. It places Grok in a competitive spotlight alongside other chatbots that companies are positioning as safer or more polished.

For readers using AI chatbots, the segment is a reminder that these tools can produce unscripted, sharp-edged output when prompted. Users should expect that the tone and content of chatbot responses depend heavily on how a request is framed.

The takeaway

The segment shows how quickly an AI product can be repurposed for public satire, and readers evaluating chatbots should note that outputs can be pushed well outside a tool's intended register. It is a practical reminder to test how a chatbot responds before relying on it for anything sensitive.