Over the last several weeks, headlines about Jimmy Kimmel Live! and the talk show's titular host have garnered different reactions based on the beholder. However, there has been some facts about the talk show host that definitely aren't up for debate. For example, there is no denying that Kimmel hasn't been afraid to go against powerful figures, as evidenced by his comments against President Donald Trump.
Another undeniable fact about Kimmel is the fact that the talk show host recently received a major honor, the International Cinematographers Guild's President’s Award. In addition to the headlines that Kimmel winning that award garnered, there has also been coverage of another huge honor going to a group of different men. In response, Kimmel mercilessly mocked those men who were given an accolade that will go down in history.
Jimmy Kimmel just mocked Elon Musk and other AI company CEOs
Since 1927, Time Magazine has announced the recipient of its Person of the Year honor. The list of recipients since it was given out the first time reads like a chronicle of the most influential people of the last 100 years. As a result, getting the honor has always been considered a big deal. In December 2025, Time announced that the 2025 Person of the Year honor was going to the "architects of AI."
While that may seem general and unclear about the people whom the publication chose, Time's coverage revealed the following list of people were the ones who were named as the Person of the Year. Nvidia's Jensen Huang, xAI's Elon Musk, Anthropic's Dario Amodei, AMD's Lisa Su, Meta's Mark Zuckerberg, DeepMind Technologies' Demis Hassabis, World Labs' Fei-Fei Li, and OpenAI's Sam Altman.
A video on Jimmy Kimmel Live!'s YouTube channel shows the talk show's host reacting to the list of people chosen to be Time's Person of the Year. Based on his remarks, it seems very clear that Kimmel wasn't a fan of Time's choice. After all, Kimmel mocked the tech CEOs being given the accolade despite his claim that they don't know how their AIs work. "They call them architects... Is it customary 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?"
Kimmel went on to mock the eight people included in Time's coverage by naming them, "the eight dorks of the apocalypse. " Kimmel also called out the publication for honoring a group of people whose companies are making it possible for people's jobs to be replaced by AI programming. "The people who replaced people are the people of the year, this year."
It is interesting to note that 2025 wasn't the first year that Elon Musk was named as a part of Time's Person of the Year coverage. In 2021, Musk was given that honor, but that time was different as he was named by himself, instead of being included in a list of other honorees.
Jimmy Kimmel Live! airs on weeknights at 11:35/10:35c on ABC.