Kumail Nanjiani, the 47-year-old star of HBO’s acclaimed comedy Silicon Valley, which ran from 2014 to 2019, recently revealed he has met many people from the real-world Silicon Valley, and not everyone was a fan of the show’s depiction of startup culture. Chief among those people, he said, was Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and world’s richest man.
Speaking on Mike Birbiglia’s podcast, Nanjiani was asked if he ever met the tech billionaires his show would lampoon, and Nanjiani said yes, he had met Musk and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, among others. But when Birbiglia asked if Musk liked the show or gave any feedback, Nanjiani replied, “He didn’t like the show.
“He was like, all the parties I go to are much cooler than these parties. I was like, yeah man, you’re one of the richest people in the world. We’re, like, losers on the show,” he said. “Of course your parties are better than my parties.”
Created by Mike Judge of Beavis and Butt-Head and King of the Hill fame, HBO’s Silicon Valley ran for 53 episodes spanning six seasons. The series followed Richard Hendricks, a brilliant but awkward programmer who builds a startup with his friends called Pied Piper. While its accuracy was often debated, the show satirized Big Tech and corporate culture, and critics commended its sharp, pointed writing that made fun of “brogrammer culture” and eccentric billionaires. Silicon Valley received five consecutive Emmy nominations for Outstanding Comedy Series.
To Musk’s point, parties in the real Silicon Valley are probably “cooler” than the ones on the HBO show, but, like Big Tech itself, many have reported on their tendency to push boundaries. Emily Chang’s 2018 book, Brotopia, described secretive gatherings featuring drug use and open sexual behavior among tech elites. Chang said these events, attended by venture capitalists and founders, often involved drugs like MDMA and “cuddle puddles” that encouraged intimacy, with women reporting stigma and exclusion depending on whether they participated or abstained.
Chang’s book claimed Musk attended at least one such party in 2017, held at investor Steve Jurvetson’s house, but Musk has since vigorously disputed the characterization of the event as a “sex party.” Musk said he believed the gathering was a costume party, saw no signs of inappropriate behavior, and left early. He provided the following statement to Wired in 2018: “Nerds on a couch are not a ‘cuddle puddle.’ I was hounded all night by DFJ-funded entrepreneurs, so went to sleep around 1am. Nothing remotely worth writing about happened,” he said. (DFJ refers to venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson.)
You can stream all six seasons of Silicon Valley on HBO Max.
For this story, Fortune used generative AI to help with an initial draft. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing.
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