“Or at least, the first person to admit it,” he said.

In his opening monologue, the eccentric tech entrepreneur behind Tesla and SpaceX offered an explanation for some of his past eyebrow-raising behaviour.

“Look, I know I say or post strange things but that’s just how my brain works. To anyone I’ve offended I just want to say, I reinvented electric cars and I’m sending people to Mars in a rocket ship,” he said.

“Did you think I was also going to be a chill, normal dude?”

Musk has previously drawn criticism for moves like publicly mocking the US Securities and Exchange Commission and calling a cave diver who rescued boys trapped in Thailand a “pedo guy”.

But on SNL, the billionaire took swipes at his own expense.

He joked about his tweets, his son’s unusual name – X Æ A-12 – and that time he smoked weed on Joe Rogan’s podcast.

And of course, as a big booster of cryptocurrencies, he once again enumerated the benefits of dogecoin.

Pressed on what exactly dogecoin is, Musk called the cryptocurrency – which now has a market value of around US$72 billion – “an unstoppable vehicle that’s going to take over the world”.

But then he agreed that actually “it’s a hustle”.

For the second time in a week, the world’s second-richest person seemed to drive the value of the digital asset.

Not long after its recent surge after Musk’s Twitter endorsement, it was sent on a brief tailspin during his SNL performance.

It dropped to as low as 49 cents during the broadcast after a pre-show high of about 74 cents, according to CoinDesk.

During the show, cast members wondered aloud why exactly the tech billionaire would want to join their set.

With a segment of a Chinese rocket reentering Earth’s atmosphere around the time of the live broadcast, they concluded that the spaceman “needed an alibi”.