Elon Musk is booed for several minutes after taking the stage of a Dave Chappelle show

New York () — Elon Musk took the stage of a show by comedian Dave Chappelle this Sunday in San Francisco, the same city where Twitter’s headquarters are located and where the billionaire recently laid off many of his employees. Musk’s appearance turned out about as well as could be expected.

The crowd at the Chase Center booed loudly at Musk, who spent much of the weekend engaging in culture wars, making transphobic statements and seemingly replicating QAnon themes.

The video of the incident at Chappelle’s show, recorded by some attendees, shows the controversial owner of Twitter taking the stage and yelling Chapelle’s famous Rick James impersonation: “I’m rich, bitch.” Afterwards, Musk is booed loudly for several minutes.

The public reaction prompted Chappelle, who has also drawn criticism for jokes about transgender people, to tell Musk: “It looks like some of the people you fired are in the audience.”

At one point, when Musk tried to speak, Chappelle cut him off, saying, “Don’t say anything. Do you hear that sound, Elon? That’s the sound of pending social upheaval.”

After more boos, Chappelle ended his show with a reprimand and a prayer.

“Booing is not the best thing to do,” he said. “I wish everyone in this auditorium the joy of feeling free and may your pursuit of happiness set you free. Amen,” she added.

On Monday, Musk appeared to be referring to the incident when he responded to a user who tweeted about “a booing crowd.” Musk he claimed that “it was 90% applause and 10% booing (except during moments of silence). But still, it’s a lot of booing, which is a first for me in real life (frequent on Twitter).”

According to several people who posted videos of the incident on Twitter, Chappelle gave Musk several opportunities to address the crowd, but the billionaire remained on stage without much reaction.

After Musk acquired Twitter for $44 billion, he enacted a series of cost-cutting measures. The billionaire has fired about half of the company’s staff, prompting a lawsuit from a group of former employees who say the mass layoffs involved multiple violations of labor rights.

The employees who stayed behind had to accept “extremely hard” work that appears to have led some people to sleep at Twitter headquarters. San Francisco is investigating reports that Musk turned various areas of the office building into makeshift rooms.

This incident at the Chase Center capped off a weekend in which Musk, with a history of erratic behavior and incendiary comments, got fully involved in the culture wars. Musk tweeted that Anthony Fauci, the outgoing director of the National Institutes of Health and Infectious Diseases, should be prosecuted, writing that his “pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci.” Musk has previously spoken about Fauci’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic, including the lockdowns that affected his Tesla plants.

Musk also echoed a theme of QAnon conspiracy theory by falsely suggesting that former Twitter trust and safety executive Yoel Roth’s doctoral dissertation turned him into an advocate of child sexualization. Those tweets subjected Roth to online harassment and abusive behavior.

Musk continued his culture war campaign on Monday, warning once on the thread of what he calls “the virus of the awakened mind”.