Who is Hosting Saturday Night Live Tonight: May 8, 2021

Tonight, SNL shoots for the moon with a new Saturday Night Live hosted by Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk!

There’s always some excitement when Saturday Night Live returns from an extended break, but this time it’s got all the tense excitement of a moon launch. And for good reason, this evening’s first-time Saturday Night Live host is this Earth’s version of Tony Stark (or is it Lex Luthor), the founder and CEO of both Tesla Inc. and Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (better known as SpaceX), Elon Musk.

Besides inventing things like electric luxury cars, Elon Musk also likes to cultivate controversy. Even the announcement that Elon Musk would be hosting Saturday Night Live tonight, brought its own degree of contention. At first, it was reported that some SNL cast members (Aidy Bryant & Bowen Yang) were upset about Musk hosting the show, but then that same gossip source, Page Six, ran a story about Elon Musk saying the cast has been “awesome” to work with and that any dissention has been “much ado about nothing.” Looks like Page Six is trying to have it both ways.

Saturday Night Live loves controversy, but in small doses. Executive Producer Lorne Michaels has never apologized for having Donald Trump host the show in 2015. He was the last non-actor, non-athlete to do so. But cast member Pete Davidson and SNL did apologize for making a joke about Congressman Dan Crenshaw’s eye patch which seemed out of character for the variety series. We’ll see if after this evening’s show with Elon Musk as the emcee, if there will be any mea culpas from Lorne Michaels or the network.

Actually, it’s completely possible that the show could open tonight backstage with Lorne and his cast members discussing their problems with Elon Musk being the host. That’s more likely to happen during tonight’s monologue where we could see cast members Aidy Bryant and Bowen Yang interrupting Elon Musk’s monologue. Real life problems with the host have worked their way into the sketches on SNL before.

In 1990, cast member Nora Dunn refused to do the show with Andrew Dice Clay hosting Saturday Night Live. That controversy was used as a gag in the SNL Cold Open that night. We could see the same thing over 30 years later.

There’s plenty of other Elon Musk moments that could be used as gimmicks in tonight’s all-new Saturday Night Live. The Atlantic called Elon Musk, “one of the most trollish, publicly chaotic figures of our time.” Elon Musk will probably try to validate that perception and poke fun at his reputation on tonight’s live SNL.

In his day job, Musk is trying to get humans to the Moon and then to Mars with his SpaceX “Starship.” His company beat out Amazon CEO Jeff Bezo’s operation “Blue Origin” for a fat government contract to build the next American moon-lander. And Musk rubbed it in Bezo’s face on Twitter. Jeff Bezo’s name could definitely come up in tonight’s monologue.

Musk also hopes to help Americans colonize Mars. Sure, Elon Musk once tweeted simply, “Nuke Mars!”. But that was shorthand for explaining the theory that if we bombard the Red Planet with with nuclear weapons, we could terraform it to be warm enough to make it habitable for Earthlings. There’s a good chance we could get a Martian colony sketch tonight as well. Because no one is trying harder to get us to Mars than Elon Musk who thinks we could be there by the end of this decade using his technology.

Elon Musk’s tweets have sometimes gotten him in trouble. He once put out a tweet regarding the price of his Tesla company’s stock. That lost the company $14 billion. Musk lost $3 billion of his own stake in the company after that stunt. Other controversies following Elon Musk around include smoking pot on Joe Rogan’s podcast which caused some to question his ability to head up multi-billion dollar corporations.

One problem SNL cast members may actually have in real-life with their host Elon Musk is his actions during the Covid19 pandemic. He echoed the wrong information about the virus that Trump was spewing out. Musk claimed that by April 2020, there would be close to zero cases of Coronavirus in the United States. Musk also jumped on the fake-news train engineered by Trump and he became an anti-vaxxer when it came to the Covid vaccine.

There’s a lot to disagree with Elon Musk about. Oh! And he named his kid, “X Æ A-12”. So, there’s that too. Hopefully, that comes up on this evening’s new Saturday Night Live. Being the Mother’s Day show, Elon Musk could introduce his kids where their names keep getting more and more complex and strange.

Based on our own research, our findings show that the SNL Cold Open tonight could kick off this new Saturday Night Live in a few different ways. The first way we already mentioned; with SNL cast members complaining about the super-billionaire inventor hosting the show. Maybe Musk could start paying off the cast members who become a lot more agreeable after receiving a cash bonus from the host to work with him.

As mentioned, tonight is also the annual Saturday Night Live Mother’s Day Show. Yay moms! There’s a good chance the show opens with the yearly tradition of SNL cast members showing off their delightful mothers and presenting them with flowers. Hopefully, cast member Pete Davidson hasn’t moved yet. That way, he and his mom could drive in together.

Or SNL may want to stay political with the cold open sketch and base it on the bizarre Presidential photo that was released this past week. It features President Biden and First Lady Dr. Jill Biden meeting former President Jimmy Carter and his wife First Lady Rosalynn Carter.

The reason the photo is so strange is because while the Bidens come across as huge, the Carters look eerily small. This will take some maneuvering by the SNL crew, but we may get a very tall Alex Moffat as President Joe and a very tall Heidi Gardner as Dr. Jill Biden on a stage riser with other cast members playing the Carters while they stand way below the current President and First Lady.

Other political news that SNL may use for inspiration tonight on Weekend Update and in sketches and shorts include Donald Trump starting a new innovative “one-way” social media platform (it’s called a blog) and Caitlyn Jenner throwing her hat in the ring and announcing a run for Governor of California.

Besides its host, there’s other billionaire news to cover on SNL with Bill & Melinda Gates divorcing in what could be the world’s most expensive split. “Divorce Court” sketch, anyone!? And in other rich people news, the Royals have exciting announcements of their own this week that SNL might use as inspiration. Queen Elizabeth is putting out her own brand of beer and Meghan Markle is releasing her first children’s book. Meghan Markle most likely being the reason why the Queen started brewing her own beer in the first place.

Plus there’s Justin Biebers new dreadlock pigtail hairstyle getting bad reviews, New York City saying “no more snow days” after figuring out how to virtually teach kids, a proposed bill in Missouri to allow pets to get restraining orders against abusive owners, Warner Bros moving forward with plans to cast a Black “Superman” for a Man of Steel movie reboot, a Florida student rigging the homecoming queen election with the help of her mom who is the school’s assistant principal and Will Smith sharing his bare dad-gut in a pic on social media.

SNL might want to recreate the NFL Draft in a sketch tonight featuring Clemson quarterback Trevor Lawrence heading to Jacksonville and BYU QB Zach Wilson going to the NY Jets. Plus, in other sports news for Weekend Update to use, Hall of Fame quarterback Terry Bradshaw was fighting with future Hall of Fame quarterback Aaron Rodgers.

And speaking of Aaron Rodgers, Saturday Night Live is really over-due for a sketch about the game show “Jeopardy!” still leaning on guest hosts filling in for the late Alex Trebek. Saturday Night Live could easily do an SNL Short featuring a laundry list of celebrities attempting to host “Jeopardy!” even though they have no business doing it. SNL always goes after any opportunity to show off their talented cast’s impersonation abilities and this would be the perfect premise to do it with.

Between featured cast member Chloe Fineman and cast member Melissa Villaseñor, SNL has more than enough impressionist fire power to pull this off. With those two alone, we could see Jennifer Lopez, Owen Wilson, Sarah Silverman, Britney Spears, Drew Barrymore, Carole Baskin, and Timothée Chalamet all trying to host “Jeopardy!“.

Just below, but not too far down, we have the SNL promos that were released for this evening’s all new episode of Saturday Night Live. Host Elon Musk who refers to himself as a “wild card” is joined by tonight’s musical guest Miley Cyrus who says “no thanks” to the rules and cast member Cecily Strong who quickly puts a damper on both of their rebellious attitudes. Next, we find out what’s new with this trio. But don’t believe Cecily Strong. She’s only wearing black to hide the stains. Plus, watch for Miley Cyrus tonight. She doesn’t have to be hosting the show to jump into an SNL sketch or two.

Elon Musk, the 2nd richest man in the world according to Forbes, is hosting an all-new Saturday Night Live tonight with musical guest Miley Cyrus featuring The Kid LAROI at 11:30pm et and live across all American time zones on NBC.

Next week, SNL is back live with host Keegan-Michael Key and musical guest Olivia Rodrigo!

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