On his new episode of Last Week Tonight, John Oliver wasted no time digging into the files related to late pedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein, which have once again ensnared former prince Andrew.
Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, as he is now known after being stripped of his royal titles for his connection to Epstein, was arrested last week – the first arrest of a senior member of the royal family in modern history – on allegations that that he had shared confidential material with Epstein while serving as a UK trade envoy.
“It’s true, they arrested former prince Andrew, and I don’t know why they’re still going with ‘alleged’ connections to Epstein there, while also running a photo that makes them look like the two closest friends I’ve ever seen,” Oliver laughed. “It looks like they’re brainstorming a new podcast. It looks like Andrew’s soft-launching: ‘Hey, would it be crazy if we moved in together?’ I’m just saying, maybe drop the ‘alleged’ part when you’re dealing with two guys that look so close they could finish each other’s prison sentences.
“And if you’re thinking: ‘Well, what was the new revelation that did it? Was it the grotesque new photo of Andrew on all fours over a young woman?’ Incredibly, no, it was apparently this.”
Emails released by the US justice department appear to show that Mountbatten-Windsor shared reports of official visits to Hong Kong, Vietnam and Singapore, as well as confidential investment opportunities in the reconstruction of Afghanistan’s Helmand province.
“Yeah, they got him on forwarding documents, which is a little underwhelming,” said Oliver. “Though, to be honest, when it comes to bringing down monsters, I don’t really care if it’s for a boring computer crime, the same way I’m not that mad if what finally ends a toddler throwing a tantrum is a cardboard box [on his head]. The method doesn’t matter. What’s important is you have been stopped.
“Now, Andrew has repeatedly denied all wrongdoing and has been released, although that does not mean he’s been found not guilty,” Oliver added, next to the now widely circulated photo of Mountbatten-Windsor upon release, slumped in the backseat of a car. “All we really have to go on right now is this fantastic picture of him leaving custody, and you can draw your own conclusions there. Reasonable people can disagree on whether this makes him look guilty – or dead.”
In his main segment, Oliver pivoted to another man caught up in the Epstein scandal: Elon Musk, and specifically the many problems with Musk’s role as the owner of Twitter, the social media site he bought (and renamed X) for $44bn in October 2022. Oliver recalled how Musk arrived at Twitter HQ on his first day carrying a sink, then posted “let that sink in”. – “a joke so funny, I’m still laughing right now”, he deadpanned.
“No one is saying Twitter was perfect before Elon arrived,” Oliver continued. “It helped platform a lot of ugliness, including but not limited to our first shit-poster president.
“But it is genuinely worse now” as a “a sewer of misinformation” with “verified” blue checks for sale. Since taking over Twitter, Musk slashed its global trust and safety staff, reduced its full-time content moderators by over 50% and reinstated the accounts of several white supremacists. Oliver cited several independent studies that found Musk’s X boosted rightwing accounts, as well as tweets from Musk himself. “At this point, it seems like there’s one option if you never want to hear anything from Elon Musk, and that’s to be his coolest child,” Oliver joked, referring to Musk’s estranged daughter Vivian Wilson, who is transgender.
“Twitter thumbing the scale toward Elon’s interests is bad for multiple reasons, not limited to his godawful jokes, his history of invoking extreme ideas like the antisemitic ‘great replacement theory’ and the fact that he was apparently a driver of US election misinformation in 2024,” he added. “But perhaps the biggest cause for concern is the fact that our current government is troublingly dependent on Elon’s platform. The Trump administration is painfully online, and particularly on Twitter.” JD Vance has described himself as a “Grok guy”, referring to Musk’s much-maligned AI bot. The FBI director, Kash Patel, has fumbled investigations by prematurely announcing arrests on X. And an infamous photo of the situation room from the US operation in Venezuela showed Pete Hegseth navigating a Twitter search for “Venezuela”.
As one White House staffer told the New Yorker: “If we have something that’s popular in rightwing Twitter, the White House is acting on it 90-plus percent of the time.”
“The fact is, a massive media platform has been shaped in the image of its poisonous owner,” Oliver said. “And it doesn’t seem like Elon’s gonna see the error of his ways anytime soon, seeing his brain seems to be thoroughly cooked by the garbage he consumes on his own site. To be honest, he still doesn’t seem to have a vision of what Twitter should be.” Asked in a recent interview why his vision of “a collective consciousness” was important, Musk fumbled for several seconds, eventually coming up with “the why of it I guess is that so … we can increase our understanding of the universe.”
“It seems like the odds of Elon fixing this are pretty slim, meaning all we can really control is how we each interact with Twitter,” Oliver surmised. His personal advice? Don’t post at all.
“There are certain areas, like news in particular, where Twitter is now worse than useless,” he said. “In fact, for breaking news, it is an active liability, as people routinely push out false information in the wake of tragedies and crises, often for money, and there don’t seem to be many guardrails to stop them.
“All of which is really a long way of saying that the Twitter that we may have once relied on and the Twitter that was fun and occasionally useful is just well and truly gone,” he concluded. “And collectively, while it might be sad, it might be past time for all of us to, if I may borrow a truly poisoned phrase, let that sink in.”
