In Texas, Elon Musk turned an eight-year-old Anne Hathaway speech into his newest Hollywood fight after footage of the actress discussing LGBTQ rights suddenly resurfaced online.
The 55-year-old Tesla CEO jumped into the controversy after professor and author Gad Saad posted a reaction video attacking Hathaway’s remarks from the 2018 Human Rights Campaign National Dinner in Washington, D.C. The clip quickly crossed one million views and eventually reached Musk’s X feed.
Hathaway delivered the original speech while accepting the National Ally for Equality Award. The actress acknowledged the advantages she experiences as a straight, white and cisgender woman before arguing that society too often treats those identities as the standard everyone else must orbit.
She also credited the LGBTQ community with helping her challenge that belief and urged the audience to reject systems that keep influence and money concentrated among a select few.
Musk was not interested in offering a gentle disagreement.
“She’s just a marionette,” he wrote.
The billionaire then suggested Hathaway had not written the speech herself and called its unidentified author the “real douchebag.” He returned in another reply to claim she was simply reading someone else’s script, adding that there was “no critical thinking” behind the performance.
Hathaway has not publicly answered Musk’s attack.
Anne Hathaway’s Old Speech Ignites a New Online Firestorm
The criticism extended well beyond Musk as viewers flooded the comments beneath Saad’s YouTube video.
“She NEVER stops acting. It’s psychotic,” one person alleged.
Another mocked Hathaway’s argument by writing, “‘There’s this myth I just made up’ — Anne Hathaway.”
“The irony of her anger at ‘the few who hold all the money’ as she stands there being one of the ones with all the money,” a third critic wrote.
Someone else complained about “rich people telling me to hate rich people,” while another viewer dismissed the entire speech as “completely out of touch with reality.”
The renewed outrage arrives as Hathaway stars as Queen Penelope in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, a blockbuster Musk has repeatedly criticized over its casting.
He previously declared that “Nolan has lost his integrity” while attacking the selection of Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy. Musk also amplified criticism involving transgender actor Elliot Page and has promised that his Grok platform will produce a supposedly more “historically accurate” version of Homer’s story.
Hathaway has not publicly responded to Musk or the latest wave of criticism.
Her speech spent nearly eight years fading into the internet archives. Musk needed only three replies and one particularly brutal puppet comparison to drag it directly back into Hollywood’s culture war.
