Elon Musk is criticizing Anne Hathaway for a 2018 speech she gave in support of the gay and trans community.
“She’s just a marionette. Whoever wrote her speech is the real douchebag,” Musk, 55, wrote via X on Sunday, July 26, in response to marketing professor Gad Saad’s brutal critique of Hathaway speaking at the Human Rights Campaign National Dinner in Washington, D.C., nearly eight years ago.
The Odyssey star, 43, appeared at the September 2018 event to accept the organization’s National Ally for Equality award, speaking to the crowd about her societal role and greater surroundings.
“With the exception of being a cisgender male, everything about how I was born has put me at the current center of a damaging and widely accepted myth,” Hathaway said at the time. “That myth is that gayness orbits around straitness, transgender orbits around cisgender, and that all races orbit around whiteness. And it is a myth that keeps money and power in the hands of the few, instead of being invested in the lives of the free.”
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Hathaway’s speech began with acknowledgment over how she viewed the world at the time.
“I’m pretty shellshocked by what I see every day, by what I hear every day. And I really don’t like to admit this but I get scared,” she told the crowd before advocating for equality. “I am just living the values my parents gave me. I’m loving you the way you deserve and yes, I am giving major side eye to anyone that thinks differently.”
Elon Musk Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
She continued, “I know I’m speaking in abstractions, and that there’s privilege embedded in my ability to do so. I know that there are very real obstacles that block the path to true equality, and I know that removing them is easier said than done.”
Hathaway added that her hope for a clear path to equality is being met by the LGBTQ+ community.
“I know that myths are destroyed by the same thing that creates them: a community,” she explained, to near-immediate applause from the crowd.
In the X critique of Hathaway’s speech, created by Saad, 61, and captioned with the text “Anne Hathaway is a Degenerate Narcissist,” the actress’ delivery is labeled as “self importance,” and smug, while her “every conceivable syllable” is slammed as “wrong.”
Anne Hathaway Cindy Ord/Getty Images for SiriusXM
In another Sunday X post from Musk that addressed Hathaway’s speech, he reiterated that Hathaway was “just reading the script someone else wrote,” while arguing that “no critical thinking” had been used to write the speech. (Musk, the world’s first trillionaire, has a long history of sharing anti-trans sentiments and beliefs. The SpaceX founder, who has 14 children with four different women, is dad to an openly trans daughter, Vivian Jenna Wilson.)
Musk’s posts, shared via the social media platform he purchased as Twitter in 2022, comes after the businessman recently made multiple public jabs at The Odyssey, in which Hathaway portrays the ancient Greek mythological figure Queen Penelope.
Musk has publicly argued that the film, created by director Christopher Nolan, does not present an historically accurate reflection due to diverse casting choices such as Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy and Elliot Page as the Greek warrior Sinon.