Elon Musk picks cringey fight with Star Wars boss Kathleen Kennedy

As the head of companies like Tesla, SpaceX, and now Twitter...sorry, X...Elon Musk is one of the most influential and wealthiest men in the world. He's also a periodic troll who picks fights online; remember when he and Facebook head Mark Zuckerberg were seriously talking to each other about having a cage fight? That would have been the weirdest moment of the 21st century so far if it had actually happened.

Lately, Musk has joined the backlash to the new Star Wars show The Acolyte, which for my money is a dull, middling series that conservative reactionaries have chosen to make their new online punching bag, mainly because it features a lot of women and people of color in prominent roles. And because the show itself is pretty lame, there's been little pushback, because who's gonna bother to defend The Acolyte?

Musk has grabbed onto this low-hanging fruit. Responding to one post about how Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy and The Acolyte showrunner Leslye Headland "hate" the Star Wars fanbase, Musk wrote, "Kathleen Kennedy is super bigoted against men." Responding to another, he wrote, "She's more deadly than the Death Star."

Why is the richest man in the world joining the culture war against Star Wars?

It's cringey when ordinary fans act like Kennedy and her fellow executives have any agenda beyond making as much money as possible (the real reason the Star Wars franchise has seemed so unexciting of late), or that a lame Star Wars show with female leads can't exist alongside lame Star Wars shows with male leads like The Book of Boba Fett and Obi-Wan Kenobi. But it's especially strange coming from a man who you figure has better things to do. Building spaceships and electric cars doesn't keep you busy?

Musk may be carrying out a grudge he's had for awhile against Disney, one of the advertisers that pulled out of X after hate speech increased under Musk's watch. During a New York Times DealBook Summit last year, Musk was asked his reaction to advertisers pulling out, and famously said, “Go f–k yourself.” He then said, "Hey Bob," a reference to Disney CEO Bob Iger, who had spoken earlier at the event.

Musk has since backtracked a bit, perhaps concluding that telling advertisers to go f*ck themselves isn't the best choice if you want to woo them to your platform. But he's still pretty bristled. “First of all, it wasn’t to advertisers as a whole. It was with respect to freedom of speech," Musk said at the Cannes Lions conference last week, according to Axios. Musk acknowledged that “of course, advertisers have a right to appear next to content that they find compatible with their brands,” but admonished companies for “insisting that there can be no content they disagree with on the platform.”

I don't think it's hard to understand why a family-friendly company like Disney wouldn't want to advertise on a platform that, again, has had a documented rise in hate speech since Elon Musk took over in 2022. If Elon Musk is free to tell advertisers to go f*ck themselves, surely they're free to take their business elsewhere.

As for The Acolyte, new episodes drop Wednesdays on Disney+. I feel like the bandwagoning hate party is dying a bit as people lose interest, but I don't want to underestimate the persistence of online culture warriors, so we'll see.

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