The Daily Show host Jon Stewart has agreed to have Elon Musk as a guest, only to be branded as “partisan” by the South African billionaire integral to the Donald Trump administration.

The Tesla and SpaceX founder’s only condition to appear as a guest was that the show would have to be “unedited.”

“After thinking about his offer, I thought, “Hey, that’s actually how the in-studio interviews normally air, is unedited,” Stewart said in a video..

“So, sure, we’d be delighted… as a matter of fact, let me sweeten or unsweeten the pot. The interview can be 15 minutes, an hour, two hours, whatever,” said the host. “I’ll be honest, I don’t think this network makes any other programming. So we can do whatever the beep we want.”

The makers of the show, which airs weeknights on Comedy Central and streams the next day on Paramount+, describe it as: “Jon Stewart and The Best F**king News Team host The Daily Show, an Emmy and Peabody Award-winning program analyzing the biggest stories in news, politics, and culture through a sharp, satirical lens.”

Stewart, who has some criticism towards Musk’s DOGE – department of government efficiency – programme, was hopeful of having an “interesting conversation” with the self-proclaimed genius guest till he checked X (Twitter before Musk got to work on it) and could not help notice another comment from Musk where he questioned host’s credentials as non-partisan.

“You give me too little credit,” Stewart said in the video, addressing Musk. “The guy who custom-made his own dark MAGA hat that he wears to opine in the Oval Office with the president who he spent $270 million to elect thinks I’m just too partisan. I’m really not sure what he thinks bipartisan means. Bipartisan is not ‘I support Donald Trump’ and also Germany’s AfD party. That’s not bipartisan, that’s the same old beep.”

Stewart said he was all in favour of efficiency and delivering better services to the American people in a cost-effective manner, and also asked Musk to be real with the people.

“Can we just drop the pretense that you won’t do it because I don’t measure up to the standards of neutral discourse that you demand and display all the times?” asked Stewart. “Because, quite frankly, that’s embarrassing…”

In 2023, Musk had challenged Mark Zuckerberg of Meta fame to a “cage fight”. Zuckerberg later called off the fight, posting: “I offered a real date…. Elon won’t confirm a date, then says he needs surgery, and now asks to do a practice round in my backyard instead. If Elon ever gets serious about a real date and official event, he knows how to reach me.”

Will The Daily Show bluster meet a similar fate? Many X users thought so.

“Elon will not do this. He cannot stand up to even slight scrutiny and Jon Stewart is an extremely good interviewer. This is the Zuckerberg fight again. He will find a way out,” wrote a user, who was identified by Grok, Musk’s own AI app on X, as “a sharp-witted John Lennon expert who skewers billionaires and Nazis alike, armed with a fierce belief that kids deserve emotional respect over high-speed police thrills”.

Another user posted: “Says he'll go on the show if it's unedited. Jon Stewart agrees. Awkwardly backs out.”