Bowen Yang made a surprise return to outdoor “Saturday Night Live,” playing disgraced tech mogul Jensen Huang as host John Mulaney led a group of tech billionaires through a CIA course on how to recognize female spies.
The cold open featured Mulaney as a CIA agent who gathered ultra-rich tech moguls at the agency’s headquarters for a crash course in how to recognize a classic spy trap, a nod to the Nvidia scandal that rocked the business world. In the sketch’s final moments, Yang, a former “SNL” cast member, arrived and delivered a pitch-perfect parody of Huang, who was forced under pressure to resign Nov. 12 from the Silicon Valley giant he built for more than 30 years amid a growing sex scandal.
Yang introduced himself “Jensen hide-your-wife Huang”. Yang, like Huang, lamented that “women don’t like guys like us. That’s how we became guys like us,” after Mulaney’s CIA agent showed him Venn diagrams that showed no overlap between beautiful women and tech billionaires. Yang also joked that when Huang walks into the room, “You know what’s about to go down: the S&P 500.” And in a nod to Nvidia’s weight in the stock market, he added, “That’s right, I’m into BDSM: breaking the stock market.”
The sketch featured “SNL regulars playing the tech billionaires who have wielded so much power over politics and culture in recent years. James Austin Johnson played Peter Thiel, Andrew Dismukes played Mark Zuckerberg, Jane Wickline played Anthropic chief Dario Amodei, Jeremy Culhane inhabited Elon Musk, and Ben Marshall impersonated OpenAI chief Sam Altman.
In a CIA conference room, Mulaney’s CIA agent used a pointer and monitor to bring up Venn diagrams to teach billionaires the difference between “a woman who would actually want to have sex with you” and “a woman who is clearly a spy.” The skit revolved around the story that made global headlines when Huang admitted to having a romantic relationship with a woman believed to be a spy for China. In the days after the scandal broke, allegations surfaced that Huang, who is married, had affairs with two Nvidia employees.
“Never date a human woman,” Dismukes said like Zuckerberg about the lesson from the Nvidia scandal. “Never date anyone lest they become the Antichrist,” Johnson offered as Thiel.
Thiel defended tech billionaires’ contributions to the common good and asked Mulaney to “name a time when technology failed us?” Mulaney cited this week’s one-two punch among massive disruptions that exposed the vulnerabilities of our wired world: Friday’s five-hour nationwide shutdown of air travel and Microsoft’s widely used email platform, Outlook, which experienced a global outage for nearly 24 hours.
“Like yesterday when all the planes were grounded? Or the day before when Microsoft Outlook went dark?” Mulaney said.
Altman wondered whether he and Thiel, who are gay, needed training to detect female spies. Johnson like Thiel added “and we’re both bears in the sense that we’ve killed a lot of hikers.”
Mulaney is in his seventh time as host of “SNL,” having worked on the series as a writer from 2008 to. He’s in the thick of campaigning for Amazon Prime Video’s John Madden biopic “Madden,” which bows on the streamer and has a limited theatrical release on Nov. 18. He is also currently touring his “Mister Which” stand-up tour. Mulaney recently took the helm in November 2024.
Phoebe Bridgers will perform for the second time as musical guest on “SNL.” She is currently touring with her new album “Lost Weekend”.
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