On Last Week Tonight, John Oliver compared Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency to the ill-fated and subpar Willy Wonka immersive experience in the United Kingdom, which quickly became a viral sensation as the largest event ripoff/mishap since the Fyre Festival.
Oliver began the episode by criticising the newly formed contracted organisation for having “no idea what they’re doing,” citing an example in which CEO Elon Musk incorrectly stated that its haphazard slashing of federal spending has resulted in $55 billion in total estimated savings.
Following the incorrect announcement, reporters discovered a slew of caveats and calculations that contributed to the oversight and inflated the figure. According to NPR, the savings were closer to $2 billion, which Oliver described as “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 went viral in February 2024, which featured 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 show, Oliver mocked Musk’s bizarre chainsaw display at CPAC, in which he celebrated DOGE’s elimination of government jobs by whipping the power tool around 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 told me. “But a chainsaw might be a good metaphor for DOGE, given Musk’s hasty and imprecise cutting.
The government was repeatedly forced to scramble to hire employees who they soon realised were critical. On Monday, we learned that they were looking for more than 300 employees to manage America’s nuclear weapons.
Then, on Tuesday, the USDA said it accidentally fired employees working on the federal government’s response to the avian flu outbreak.”
