SNL Cold Open: John Mulaney Briefs Tech CEOs on Spotting Female Spies

Saturday Night Live opened its latest episode with host John Mulaney playing a CIA officer who gives tech chief executives a crash course in detecting female spies. The sketch names its first target directly: ousted Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.

Mulaney summons a lineup of Silicon Valley leaders to agency headquarters for a briefing on a matter of national security. The cast includes:

• Peter Thiel, played by James Austin Johnson
• Sam Altman, played by Ben Marshall
• Dario Amodei, played by Jane Wickline
• Mark Zuckerberg, played by Andrew Dismukes
• Elon Musk, played by Jeremy Culhane

"America needs you to learn the difference between a woman who would actually want to have sex with you, and a woman who is clearly a spy," Mulaney tells the group. He then asks what lesson they draw from Huang's downfall.

The answers come fast and each lands a punch at a specific figure. "Never date a Chinese woman," Amodei says. "Never date a human woman," Zuckerberg answers. "Never date anyone, lest they become the antichrist," Thiel says.

How does the sketch teach the lesson?

Mulaney turns to a Venn diagram. It shows two circles that do not overlap at all: "beautiful women" on one side and "your interests and opinions" on the other. "So," he asks the group, "if someone is both of these things, then they are a what?"

"An angel," Amodei replies confidently.

When Mulaney informs them that such a person would in fact be a spy, Musk launches into one of his unfunny tangents about James Bond. Mulaney squirts him with a water bottle to make him stop.

A second Venn diagram follows. It appears after Zuckerberg says that if a woman approached him, he would read it as a sign she "wanted to sleep with the man who created the Metaverse, as all women do." The new diagram keeps "beautiful women" in one circle. In a much, much smaller circle to the right, labeled "people who like the metaverse," there is an image of just Zuckerberg.

What does Jensen Huang have to say?

The sketch then hands the floor to the man at the center of the premise. "Maybe it would help if I handed this over to someone who learned this lesson the hard way," Mulaney says. Former SNL cast member Bowen Yang enters as Huang.

"Ladies, when you invite Jensen over, you know what's about to go down: the S&P 500," Yang says. "That's right, I'm into BDSM: breaking the stock market. Fellas, don't be like me. Remember, women don't like guys like us. That's how we became guys like us."

The cold open turns Huang's reported downfall into a broader send-up of Silicon Valley's most powerful men and their blind spots, and it gives Yang the closing line. What it changes for the reputations of the executives impersonated on stage is another matter entirely — the show has made clear it will keep returning to this roster.