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Bowen Yang made a surprise return to “Saturday Night Live” in the cold open, playing the disgraced tech mogul Jensen Huang as host John Mulaney led a group of tech billionaires through a CIA class on how to recognize
female spies.
The cold open featured Mulaney as a CIA agent who gathered ultra-rich tech moguls at the agency’s headquarters for a crash course on how to recognize a classic espionage honeytrap, a nod to the Nvidia scandal that has rocked the business world. In the closing moments of the sketch, former “SNL” trouper Yang walked in delivering a pitch-perfect spoof of Huang, who was forced under pressure to resign on Nov. 12 from the Silicon Valley giant that he built for more than 30 years amid a growing sex scandal.
Yang introduced himself “Jensen Hide-Your-Wife Huang.” Yang as Huang lamented that “women don’t like guys like us. That’s how we became guys like us,” after Mulaney’s CIA agent flashes him Venn diagram charts that show no overlap between beautiful women and tech billionaires. Yang also quipped that when Huang comes into the room, “You know what’s about to go down — the S&P 500.” And in a nod to Nvidia’s heft in the stock market, he added: “That’s right — I’m in to BDSM: Breaking the stock market.”
The sketch featured “SNL regulars playing the tech billionaires who have flexed so much power over politics and culture in recent years. James Austin Johnson played Peter Thiel, Andrew Dismukes limned Mark Zuckerberg, Jane Wickline played Anthropic chief Dario Amodei, Jeremy Culhane inhabited Elon Musk and Ben Marshall spoofed OpenAI chief Sam Altman.
In a CIA conference room setting, Mulaney’s CIA agent used a pointer and monitor to flash Venn diagram graphics to school the billionaires in the difference between “Woman who would actualy want to have sex with you” and “A woman who is clearly a spy.” The sketch turned on the story that has made global headlines as Huang admitted to have a romantic relationship with a woman who is believed to be a spy for China. In the days since the scandal broke, allegations surfaced that Huang, who is married, had relationships with two employees at Nvidia.
“Never date a human woman,” Dismukes as Zuckerberg said of the lesson to draw from the Nvidia scandal. “Never date anyone lest they become the antichrist,” Johnson as Thiel offered.
Thiel defended the contributions of tech billionaires to the greater good and asked Mulaney to “name one time when technology has let us down?” Mulaney cited this week’s one-two punch of the massive disruptions that exposed the vulnerabilities of our wired world: The five-hour national ground stop on air travel on Friday and Microsoft’s widely used email platform Outlook experiencing a global outage for nearly 24 hours.
“Like yesterday when every plane was grounded? Or the day before when Microsoft Outlook went dark? Mulaney said.
Altman questioned whether he and Thiel, who are gay, needed the training to detect female spies. Johnson as Thiel added “and we are both bears in the sense that we’ve killed a lot of hikers.”
Mulaney is notching his seventh time as host of “SNL,” after working on the show as a writer from 2008 to He’s in the midst of a push for Amazon Prime Video’s John Madden biopic “Madden,” which bows on the streamer and in limited theatrical release on Nov. 18. He’s also touring at present on his “Mister Whatever” stand-up tour. Mulaney most recently took the helm in November 2024.
Phoebe Bridgers will perform as “SNL” musical guest for the second time. She’s currently on tour with her newest album “Lost Weekend.”
