Sophia Michaels
Elon Musk obviously has thoughts on Amazon’s new Lord of the Rings series, The Rings of Power.
On Twitter Monday, Aug. 5, Musk tweeted out, “Tolkien is turning in his grave.” He then elucidated his hot take by complaining, “Almost every male character so far is a coward, a jerk or both. Only Galadriel is brave, smart and nice.” (And, just for good measure, Musk ended the thread with a non-sequitur complaint about the plethora of bots in his replies.)
As with most things Musk, his Rings of Power tweets at once feel like quotidian shitposts and something somehow more than that. For one thing, Musk and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos have had a stupid rich person feud going for a long time now, and ragging on the show that reportedly cost Amazon $715 million to make is a good way to stick it to a rival.
Then again, all publicity is good publicity. If any of Musk’s 105 million followers on Twitter are convinced by his tweets to even “hate watch” Rings of Power, that’s more eyeballs (and Prime Video data) for Bezos.
The other layer on this terrible tasting cake is Musk’s incredibly specific complaint about how every male character on Rings of Power is “a coward, a jerk or both.” This is a guy, after all, who seems to have quite a penchant for injecting himself into the culture wars. Though, to be fair, he doesn’t seem as peeved as some LOTR fans over the fact that the Galadriel in the series behaves differently from the Galadriel of the novels/films. And thank god Musk didn’t wade into the other culture war bullshit surrounding the series.
