‘Eight dorks of the apocalypse’: Jimmy Kimmel roasts Time’s cover for honoring Elon Musk and others who don’t need a tribute

Late-night host Jimmy Kimmel didn’t hold back when reacting to Time magazine’s 2025 Person of the Year cover, immediately slamming the eight tech CEOs featured as “the eight dorks of the apocalypse.” Kimmel kicked off his show, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, with a dramatic reveal, making it clear he wasn’t happy with the magazine’s selection or the overall execution of the piece. The magazine titled the massive group the “Architects of AI,” but Kimmel and his studio audience were definitely not buying the celebratory tone.

When he unveiled the winners, the crowd actually booed the decision, prompting Kimmel to quip that he was “expecting more enthusiasm” for the tech titans. You’re looking at a lineup that includes some truly massive names in the industry, like Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, xAI’s Elon Musk, and OpenAI’s Sam Altman, just to name a few of the more recognizable faces. The full list also featured AMD’s Lisa Su, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, and Fei-Fei Li of Stanford and World Labs.

That’s a powerful crew, but Kimmel clearly thinks they don’t deserve the honor. Kimmel took massive issue with the title itself, questioning the magazine’s choice to label them as architects. He wondered aloud if it was typical for “an architect to have no idea how a building they’ve designed works or whether or not it will one day rise up to try to kill them?”

Jimmy Kimmel isn’t impressed with the AI chargers

The biggest concern we hear constantly is that artificial intelligence will eventually automate and eliminate jobs currently performed by human workers. Kimmel leaned heavily into that idea, highlighting the major irony of “the people who replaced people” winning this year’s top award. Kimmel definitely wasn’t done with the content critique, though; he also roasted the visual style of the magazine cover itself.

People aren’t happy with AI in general, especially with big businesses trying to replace humans anywhere they can. The late-night host paused his monologue specifically to tell producers to “put that cover back up for a second” so he could get back to roasting the design.

“I want to say, ironically, with as much as you can do with AI graphically, it looks like Photoshop from 2007,” he snarked. That is a brutal assessment, especially considering the people on the cover are literally pushing the boundaries of digital technology and advanced graphics.

Time did provide some context for the visual choice, explaining that the digital painting by Jason Seiler was actually meant to be “an homage to the famous 1932 photograph of construction workers on a steel beam 800 feet above the RCA building in New York City.” It sounds like they were going for a classic, high-stakes, dangerous construction metaphor.

The magazine itself has been very vocal about the profound impact these individuals and their technology are having on society. They noted that thanks to titans like Huang, Altman, and SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son, humanity is now “flying down the highway, all gas no brakes, toward a highly automated and highly uncertain future.”

While the pace of progress is incredibly impressive, I can totally understand why Kimmel and his audience feel like that uncertainty is more terrifying than celebratory. Everyone should be afraid of AI, and it should be regulated when it goes into the media and outside.