On Last Week Tonight, John Oliver drew parallels between Elon Musk‘s Department of Government Efficiency to the ill-fated and shoddy Willy Wonka immersive experience in the U.K., which quickly became a viral sensation as the largest event ripoff/mishap since the Fyre Festival.
Oliver began the episode by criticizing the newly formed contracted organization as having “no idea what they’re doing,” pointing to an example where head Elon Musk mistakenly stated that its haphazard slashing of federal spending has resulted in $55 billion in total estimated savings.
Following the erroneous announcement, reporters uncovered a flurry of caveats and calculations that led to the oversight and inflated the number. As NPR estimated, the savings actually amounted closer to $2 billion, which Oliver quipped was “a lot of numbers away” from the originally touted figure.
“In fact, there hasn’t been such a stark disconnect between marketing and reality since it turned out the Glasgow Wonka Experience was actually this,” he said, flashing an image from the event that took the internet by storm in February 2024, featuring an image of a downtrodden-looking, green-haired woman surrounded by beakers and a cloud of smoke.
“Right now, we are all her,” Oliver joked.
Earlier in the program, Oliver also mocked Musk’s bizarre chainsaw display at CPAC, in which he celebrated DOGE’s gutting of government jobs by whipping around the power tool at random.
“I’m not legally allowed to say what I want to happen there, but I can and am thinking it really hard right now,” he said. “But a chainsaw might actually be a pretty apt metaphor for DOGE given that Musk’s cutting hastily and without a lot of precision. The government’s repeatedly had to scramble to hire employees they suddenly realized were essential. On Monday, we learned they were trying to hire more than 300 employees tasked with managing America’s nuclear weapons. Then on Tuesday, the USDA said it accidentally fired employees who are working on the federal government’s response to the avian flu outbreak.”
