Bill Maher joked Friday that if he built a utopia, he wouldn’t do it in Austin, Texas, since the Wall Street Journal reported this week that Twitter and SpaceX are billionaires Elon Musk plans to do.
Former VP of News at Vice Josh Tyrangiel And New York Times columnist John McWhorter joined Maher Real time Friday night, and the three laughed a few times over reports of Musk’s plans for a town, called Snailbrook, to be located outside of Austin, near the Boring Company and SpaceX facilities.
“If I was going to build a utopia, all due respect to Austin, I wouldn’t put it there,” Maher joked. “I mean, that’s just me. And I love Austin. I like Austin a lot. I keep it weird every time I go.
Musk had toyed with the idea of establishing a city in Texas before. a People magazine article two years ago almost to the day before this week Wall Street Journal story was about Musk’s desire to build a city called Starbase.
In reply to Maher, McWhorter said Musk “is not tenacious” and doesn’t trust Musk for such a dramatic ideal.
“I’m not sure he thought hard enough about how a utopia would actually work outside of the kind of Disney World, beautiful picture it would be in the beginning,” he said. “I don’t trust him to do this, I think I’d rather see a group of people put their heads together.”
Tyrangiel pointed out that utopia “is a personal concept”.
“And my personal concept is not the same as Elon’s, I’m pretty sure of that,” he said. “And so like my first thought, my first thought is like, Well, I’m definitely not going to live there.”
Maher said, “utopia does not exist.”
“Never use the word utopia or think you can create a utopia,” he said. “What a silly message that is. Talk about a promising swindler.”
That line received a lot of applause, but it should be noted that the article fails to quote Musk calling his planned city a utopia. However, it had these unusual details:
Some of Boring’s employees, including Steve Davis, the company’s president and a top lieutenant of Mr. Musk, have sometimes described even bigger plans, including creating an entire city, according to some of those people and text messages viewed by The Wall Street Journal.
At an all-hands meeting of Boring employees last year, Mr. Davis that they should hold a mayoral election, according to text messages and people familiar with the meeting.
Mr. Musk, his former girlfriend, who is the singer Grimes, Kanye West and Mr. West’s architectural designer discussed what a Musk city might look like several times last year, according to people familiar with the discussions. Those conversations contained broad ideas and some visual mock-ups, said one of the people, but did not lead to concrete plans.
Representatives for Mr. West, whose name is Ye, and Grimes, whose real name is Claire Boucher, were not available for comment.
Maher, replying to Tyrangiel that he certainly wouldn’t live there, added, “Well, I can think of worse places to live and worse people to live under” before moving on to the next topic.
Watch the clip above, via CNN and HBOs Real Time with Bill Maher.
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