‘Back To You Being a Genius’: Bill Maher Conducts Fawning Interview With Elon Musk

Bill Maher, the host of HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, conducted a fawning interview with billionaire Elon Musk on Friday, during which he called the Twitter CEO a “likable guy,” a “genius,” and someone who is right about almost everything.

At the beginning of the show, Maher said there were “very few people who actually make change happen” in the world, before identifying Musk as “one of those people.”

“You’re a likable guy. They attack you a lot and you seem to laugh it off, which I think is fantastic,” said Maher. “I love it that you have a sense of humor because a guy as important as you who makes changes could use your powers for evil and not good.”

“You have a sense of humor,” Maher continued. “You like laughing, you like to be funny, as opposed to somebody like Zuckerberg who I’m not even sure is a real boy.”

After Musk responded that he was a fan of comedy, and revealed he was once in Maher’s audience himself years ago, Maher replied, “Let me get back to you being a genius.”

Maher went on to ask Musk a series of easy questions, with the two spending much of the interview talking about the “woke mind virus.”

“You and I are both in that little group of people, maybe it’s a bigger group now, who are called conservative, who haven’t really changed,” said Maher, before adding that he didn’t think of Musk “as a conservative.”

Musk responded that he considered himself a “moderate,” noting his work at Tesla developing electric cars, which he pointed out wasn’t “exactly far right.”

After Maher pointed out that Musk had recently been interviewed by Tucker Carlson before the Fox News was fired from the network on Monday, Maher said he hoped it wasn’t “an omen” for his own show, to which Musk joked he was like “the Typhoid Mary of talk shows”

Asked about Carlson’s Twitter video receiving more views than Fox News’s 8pm slot received in viewers on Wednesday, Musk acknowledged that Twitter had “a lot of people’s attention.”

“Twitter has a tremendous audience. So there’s 250 million people that spend an average of half an hour a day on Twitter,” he said. “It’s about 120 to 130 million user hours per day and it’s been increasing.”

Maher concluded the interview by telling Musk, “I think you’re right about almost everything.”

“Geniuses are going to be a little quirky sometimes, but your heart is always in the right place,” he said. “You are trying to fix this world, and look I could talk to you forever… I’d love to get high with you.”

Following the interview, Maher wrote on Twitter, “Finally got to talk to the guest I’ve wanted to have on @HBO @RealTimers more than any other – Thank you, @ElonMusk!”

Maher has previously defended Musk on his show and said in October 2022, “I don’t know if Elon Musk is the God we want to piss off.”

Watch above via HBO on YouTube.

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