NEW YORK — The Ed Sullivan Theater turned into a courtroom, a confessional, and a coliseum all at once. Stephen Colbert, eyes blazing like a man who’d just read the unredacted tax returns of every tech titan in the room, grabbed the mic on Tuesday’s Late Show and delivered a 12-minute evisceration so raw, so fearless, and so surgically precise that even the band forgot to play him off. He didn’t just roast Zuckerberg and Musk — he indicted the entire billionaire elite, called them “our new feudal lords,” and dared the audience to look away while Manhattan’s moneyed class watched in stunned, champagne-choking silence.

“Folks,” he began, voice low and lethal, “we now live in a country where two unelected tech bros — one who looks like a Bond villain who lost a fight with a tanning bed, the other who thinks apartheid emeralds are personality traits — have more power than the Senate, the Supreme Court, and your mom’s group chat combined.” The first laugh was nervous. The second was a roar.

He projected a split-screen: Musk grinning next to Trump at a Mar-a-Lago table, Zuckerberg’s awkward bow-tie dinner footage from the same weekend. “Exhibit A: Elon and Mark, the world’s richest hall monitors, racing each other to see who can kiss the ring faster. One buys a social network and turns it into a sewer of conspiracy. The other spends years censoring grandmas, then flips overnight because the new sheriff likes his tax breaks uncut. Congratulations, gentlemen — you’ve achieved peak American Dream: from garage nerds to garage dictators.”

Then came the kill shot.

“Let’s be clear: these aren’t innovators anymore. They’re extraction artists. They extract your data, your attention, your democracy, and now — thanks to a certain incoming administration — they’re about to extract your regulations, your labor protections, your right to not be ruled by people who think ‘empathy’ is a software update scheduled for 2029.”

The crowd was no longer laughing with him; they were gasping with him.

He paced the stage like a prosecutor who’d just found the smoking server.

“Elon wants to colonize Mars because Earth is running out of workers he can pay in exposure bucks. Mark wants to colonize the metaverse because real humans keep asking him uncomfortable questions about privacy. And together? They’ve turned the internet — this beautiful, chaotic invention that once let a kid in a basement share cat videos — into a dystopian casino where the house always wins and the chips are your civil liberties.”

Colbert paused, let the silence hang like a guillotine.

“I’m not saying they’re evil geniuses. I’m saying they’re mediocre men who got lucky with timing, surrounded themselves with yes-men, and now mistake wealth for wisdom. And the scariest part? They’re not even the smartest people in their own companies. They just own the equity.”

He ended with a single line that detonated across every screen in America:

“History is going to remember this era not as the age of innovation, but as the age when we let a handful of billionaires in hoodies and spacesuits cosplay as kings while the rest of us fought over the crumbs of a democracy they sold for stock options.”

The applause was deafening. Half the audience was on its feet; the other half looked like they’d just realized their 401(k) was funding the apocalypse.

Manhattan hasn’t recovered.

By Wednesday morning #ColbertBillionaires was the global No. 1 trend with 4.8 million posts. TikTok exploded with Gen Z stitching the monologue over cyberpunk dystopia footage: “He really just read the entire Forbes list for filth in prime time.” Late-night group chats among hedge-fund wives turned into emergency therapy sessions. One Park Avenue banker reportedly whispered to his doorman, “He’s not wrong… and that’s the worst part.”

Zuckerberg’s team issued a statement so bland it could’ve been generated by AI: “Meta is focused on building tools for creators.” Translation: crickets. Musk, predictably, fired off a midnight X rant: “Colbert’s jealous because he’ll never have a rocket ship 😂.” The reply that broke the internet? Colbert quote-tweeting at 3 a.m. with a single photo of the Apollo 11 crew and the caption: “Some of us are happy just putting a man on the moon instead of turning Earth into a landfill, Elon.”

Even the White House press pool was forced to address it when a reporter asked Karoline Leavitt about “Colbert’s feudal lords comment.” She laughed it off as “late-night comedy,” but her smile didn’t reach her eyes.

Colbert, sipping coffee on the CBS rooftop Wednesday, told a producer off-mic: “I didn’t say anything that hasn’t been whispered in every newsroom, boardroom, and bedroom in this city for years. I just said it out loud, on network television, with the lights on.”

Manhattan — the city that invented both Wall Street and the apology tour — has no idea what to do with a man who refuses to apologize.

The monologue is already being called “the most dangerous 12 minutes in late-night history.”

And somewhere in a quiet apartment uptown, Stephen Colbert is probably writing tomorrow night’s follow-up.

Because when you’ve just declared war on the people who own the internet, the only thing left to do is reload.