The Boys' Elon Musk Parody Continues A 20-Year Feud

4 weeks ago 12

Warning: This article contains spoilers for The Boys’ series finale.

The show parodied Kendall Jenner’s notorious Pepsi commercial with A-Train; it parodied the polarizing girlpower moment from Avengers: Endgame. The Boys uses a superhero-infested comic book universe to satirize the rampant capitalism of our celebrity-obsessed culture, and the obscene excesses of the one percent, and that involves making fun of a lot of famous people.

Earlier this week, The Boys dropped its series finale on Prime Video. The final showdown between Homelander and Billy Butcher lived up to the hype, most everyone ended up in a good place, and there were more than a few chuckles along the way. Perhaps the funniest moment in The Boys’ series finale is a not-so-subtle jab at tech-bro billionaire and government meddler Elon Musk.

Amazon's The Boys Takes An Unflattering Shot At Elon Musk

The Boys has taken plenty of jabs at Musk in the past. When Donald Trump appointed Musk the head of a budget-cutting, medicaid-slashing government agency called the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), The Boys’ official social media account wasted no time making fun of his cushy new position. Vought International announced that The Deep would be running his own government agency: the Department of Preserving Earth (DOPE). Gen V went as far as mentioning Musk by name when Cipher tasked Marie Moreau with testing her powers around goats. As she worried about hurting the goats, Cipher assured her they were named after “a**holes” (you can guess what one of them was called).

But the series finale takes its Musk-bashing to another level. While Homelander prepares to declare himself God, he’s pestered by an eccentric billionaire named Günter Van Ellis, who looks kinda familiar. With his cap and try-hard all-black attire, Günter is clearly a parody of Musk. He’s got 17 children, he’s an “amateur astronaut,” and he’s the richest man in the world — and he has a few demands for Homelander. Oh Father tells Homelander that he has to suck up to billionaires like Günter, because they’re the ruling class of America, but Homelander doesn’t like that.

Homelander follows Günter out onto the balcony, picks him up, and soars into the sky. Seconds later, he comes back down without Günter, and tells Oh Father that he took the astronaut into space. This unscrupulous billionaire is the last person Homelander kills before Butcher arrives in the Oval Office and strips him of his powers. We’ve seen Homelander kill dozens of innocent people over the years, but his final on-screen kill is a real-life supervillain.

Elon Musk & Jeff Bezos Have A Longstanding Rivalry

Musk has a longstanding rivalry with fellow billionaire Jeff Bezos. For years, they’ve each been trying to amass more billions than the other, and they both have ambitious plans to explore the cosmos. The Boys’ latest Musk parody touches on that billionaire space race; it mockingly dubs Musk an “amateur astronaut” (which is true, but could also apply to Bezos) and it kills its Musk avatar by leaving him to suffocate in space.

It’s unlikely that Bezos had a hand in this gag, or any of The Boys’ previous Musk references, but it is on his platform. The Boys is Amazon’s biggest streaming franchise, and it can’t be a coincidence that it’s full of satirical jabs at Bezos’ biggest rival (with nary a harmless one-liner referencing Bezos himself).