Texas Billionaire Elon Musk has revived an eight-year-old Anne Hathaway speech after footage of the actress discussing LGBTQ rights suddenly resurfaced online, turning the old remarks into a fresh social media controversy.
The Tesla CEO joined the debate after professor and author Gad Saad shared a reaction video criticizing comments Hathaway made during a 2018 Human Rights Campaign event.
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 is expected to fit.
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, calling whoever he believed was responsible for it 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.
Musk’s criticism comes as Hathaway prepares to appear in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, a film the billionaire has already attacked over its casting.
Hathaway has not publicly responded to Musk’s criticism.
Anne Hathaway’s Resurfaced Speech Divides Viewers
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.”
Not everyone was piling on Hathaway, however. In a separate Reddit discussion about Saad’s criticism, some users defended the actress and questioned why an eight-year-old equality speech was generating fresh outrage. One commenter described Hathaway as an “empathetic person” based on how she has used her platform to support progressive causes. Others turned their criticism toward Saad himself, with one questioning why his reaction was being treated as a thoughtful response in the first place.
Musk’s criticism of Hathaway also follows his increasingly vocal complaints about Nolan’s upcoming film. He previously declared that “Nolan has lost his integrity” while criticizing the casting of Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy.
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.
Her speech spent nearly eight years fading into the internet archives. Musk needed only three replies and one puppet comparison to drag it directly back into Hollywood’s culture war.
