“Can we just drop the pretense?”: Jon Stewart calls out Musk’s excuses for avoiding “Daily Show”

Jon Stewart is calling out Elon Musk for dancing around a joint interview the tech billionaire originally agreed to, after a week of trading jabs.

On Monday’s episode of “The Daily Show,” Stewart addressed the growing tension with Musk following Stewart’s previous critiques of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), in which Stewart condemned the agency’s cost-cutting measures, which have led to mass layoffs of federal workers and the dissolution of low-cost government programs. He also accused Musk, along with other billionaires and corporations, of exploiting taxpayers while reaping the benefits and enabling the corruption that sustains their wealth.

In response to Stewart’s critique and a number of people online urging Musk to talk it out with Stewart on the show, Musk wrote on X, “I will do it if the show airs unedited.”

The “Daily Show” accepted his offer, with Stewart stating in the opening segment, “After thinking about his offer, I thought, you know, hey, that’s actually how the in-studio interviews normally are – it’s unedited – so, sure. We’d be delighted”

“I’ll be honest, I don’t think this network makes any other programming, so we can do whatever the f**k we want as long as we wrap before the new season of ‘South Park,’ which comes out like May or June of 2026,” Stewart joked.

“So I am game. I think it’ll be an interesting conversation,” Stewart said. “But then I checked X again and I saw another tweet from Elon because you can’t not . . . “

Musk, who in the past said Stewart was “awesome,” changed his tune after agreeing to the interview, referring to the comedy show host as “far left” and a “propagandist.”

“Jon is too set in his ways. He used to be more bipartisan,” Musk wrote in an earlier post to X, making it look like this interview may not be actually happening.

“The guy who custom-made his own dark MAGA hat that he wears to opine in the Oval Office with the president who he spent $270 million to elect thinks I’m just too partisan,” Stewart fired back.

“I’m really not sure what he thinks ‘bipartisan’ means, but it’s generally not, ‘I support Donald Trump and also Germany’s AFD party.’ That’s not bipartisan — that’s just the same s**t,” Stewart pointed out.

“Look, Elon, I do have some criticisms about DOGE,” Stewart said. “I support, in general, the idea of efficiency and delivering better services to the American public in cheaper and more efficient ways.”

He concluded, “If you want to come on and talk about it on the show, great. If you don’t want to, sure. But can we just drop the pretense that you won’t do it because I don’t measure up to the standards of neutral discourse that you demand and display at all times? Because, quite frankly, that’s bulls**t. You know it. I know it. Bulls**t.”

“The Daily Show” airs Monday through Thursday at 11 p.m. ET on Comedy Central and streams on Paramount+.