Bill Maher dedicated part of the “New Rules” segment on this week’s episode of Real Time to a laundry list of advice for Elon Musk. The satirical talk show host went in on the world’s richest man, imploring him not to throw himself back into the arms of Donald Trump like some toxic ex.
“I get it. You were hurt in your previous relationship with the left, so you threw yourself into a bad rebound,” Maher said. “I see you’re thinking of crawling back. Don’t do it. Don’t do it. It’s a terrible idea. He’s not good for you.“
Instead, Maher appealed to Musk’s “genius,” telling the audience that Musk had invented more “vital, life-shaping things” than anyone since Thomas Edison. “This is a resource that I don’t think we have the luxury of discarding,” Maher said.
I regret some of my posts about President @realDonaldTrump last week. They went too far.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 11, 2025
Ever the centrist trying to repair burned bridges, the comedian rattled off a pep talk to Musk, reminding him of all the great things he had accomplished prior to getting involved with the MAGA crowd.
“I just want you to look at everything you developed before Trump—the electric cars, the reusable rockets, the brain chips. And then look what you developed after Trump—a drug habit,” Maher quipped.
“And we need our boy genius to be more stable. Come on. You’re older now, pretty soon, you might even start having kids.”
That said, Maher did acknowledge that Musk has made some pretty questionable decisions of late. Musk’s purchase of Twitter, supposedly in an effort to make it a “bastion of free speech,” turned the social media site “from a place conservatives felt supremely unwelcome to the reverse.”
“That’s not what it looks like to appeal to 80 percent,” he joked, referencing Musk’s recent theorizing that America needs a new, centrist party to represent the middle ground and that he should be the one to found it.
Then, of course, there was the chaotic Department of Government Efficiency, the semi-official taskforce named after a meme and spearheaded by unknowns barely old enough to drink who seemed to take marching orders from Stripe in Gremlins.
“You acted like a doctor who always wants to pull the plug and harvest the organs while the rest of us are going, ‘I just came in for a bikini wax,’” Maher prodded. “That wasn’t big dick energy, that was being a dick energy.”
Conceding it was “worth a try,” Maher said the tech-billionaire was never going to fit in with “that carnival of crayon eaters,” in Washington. “Congress people? This is the job for people who are the opposite of exceptional. Corporate shills wearing flag pins.”
Maher’s advice to us? Stop being mad at Musk long enough to consider that his idea of a centrist political party is a good one, even if he is perhaps not the guy to do it.
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