ELON MUSK ELIX : LIVE

Musk sheds skin for 'Saturday Night Live' : the show aimed to soften rough edges of his public persona.

During his monologue on Saturday Night Live [SNL], billionaire Elon Musk dropped a huge surprise for viewers and fans before clowning through skits for the first global live stream of the NBC Universal Comedy Show, Musk said he ''is the first person with Asperger's'' to host it.

Musk, who is one of the world's richest individuals, downplayed his tendency to speak in a monotone, adding, ''I'm pretty good at running human in emotional mode.''

In the autism spectrum, Asperger is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by significant difficulties in social interaction and nonverbal communication, along with restricted and repetitive patterns of behaviour and interests. It is sometimes referred to as high - functioning autism. 

Dan Aykroyd, comedian and an SNL alumni often opened up about dealing with a mild form of Asperger's in various interviews. He hosted SNL Live in 2003.

Many had wondered how Musk would conduct himself during a live comedy show. the answer was that he, and the show's writers, sought to soften the rough edges of Musk's public persona.

Throughout the show, Musk gently poked fun at himself, including his penchant for provocative tweets and the time he smoked a joint on a podcast. ''To anyone I've offended, I just want to say, I reinvented the electric cars and I'm sending people to Mars on a rocket ship. Did you think I would be a chill, normal dude?''

Musk's mother, Maye, joined him on stage and the two made a joke about Dogecoin, the cryptocurrency Musk has touted. Cryptocurrency jokes popped up throughout the show.

In one sketch, Musk was cast as a bowtie wearing cryptocurrency expert on the show's Weekend Update segment. Dogecoin and other digital currencies had surged in price ahead of Musk's SNL appearance.

Dogecoin fell during the show and was last down about 12% from late Friday at around $0.53. It hit a record high Thursday above $0.73.

Musk was most convincing playing a version of himself as head of SpaceX dealing with an emergency on a Martian colony. The crisis had a happy ending until it didn't. 

In the end Musk will keep his day jobs. Still, the SNL appearance offered plenty of synergies with the real gigs as ''technoking'' and Chief Executive of TESLA [NASDAQ TSLA] Inc, head of rocket launch company SpaceX and even chief of the Boring Company, a tunnel construction venture.

Musk got days of attention across all forms of media ahead of the show, and shared the spotlight with a prototype Tesla's futuristic Cybertruck that Tesla brought to Manhattan on Friday.

Video of the hulking, angular pickup prowling Manhattan streets blew up on social media. During the show, a Tesla supercharger made an incongruous cameo appearance in a skit set in an old West saloon. 

Musk played a gunslinger, who had developed an electric horse, and an advanced tunnelling through the earth to escape a shootout. [Reuters]