by Jack Morse
Not content to disrupt the way we move from Point A to Point B, tech CEO's Elon Musk and Travis Kalanick will be disrupting our late-night comedy in the coming weeks. The much-anticipated opening-week guest list for Stephen Colbert's Late Show was announced yesterday, and you guessed it, Musk and Kalanick are prominently featured.
In happier news, Stephen Colbert has announced his first week's worth of guests on The Late Show. pic.twitter.com/2UzsXqz5bg
— Dave Itzkoff (@ditzkoff) August 24, 2015
When The Late Show premieres this September 8th, all eyes will be on the comedian made famous by his bombastic Bill O'Reilly-inspired character as host of The Colbert Report. But with his selection of SpaceX and Telsa CEO Musk and Uber CEO Kalanick as guests, Colbert appears to be making a bid to differentiate himself from other late night talk shows that have a tendency to focus on lighter fare and as Endgadget notes, Colbert's always had a thing for emerging tech on his show.
Or he may just ask the two men when he'll be able to hail an Uber to space.
While Kalanick may very well seize the opportunity to publicly criticize New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio for his (at present) failed attempt to cap the number of ride-share vehicles allowed on the streets of NYC, it is more likely that he'll attempt to skirt questions about Uber's accelerating losses.
Ultimately, with Colbert having promised to move away from the bluster of the self-titled character he played for years on The Colbert Report, it is anyone's guess how he'll approach the two powerhouses of the 21st-century transportation industry. Our best bet? He'll remind Musk that only one of them has a treadmill bearing his name on the International Space Station, and then hail an Uber home.