World's richest film bro very mad at Christopher Nolan over casting of fake 3,000-year-old woman

The subtext of much of Musk’s “commentary” on this matter has been so close to the surface as to essentially be a pontoon boat. To wit: Because Nyong’o is Black, she obviously couldn’t be cast as the world’s most beautiful woman on her own merits, so the casting must be some kind of elaborate diversity ploy on Nolan’s part—possibly in an effort to curry favor with the Academy Awards. (Musk and the various people he uses to retweet his arguments for him on Twitter don’t say the “Black” part outright, instead using their usual language about “Western civilization”—although professional bloviator Matt Walsh got pretty close when he asserted that “Not one person on the planet actually thinks that Lupita Nyong’o is ‘the most beautiful woman in the world.’” Musk: “True.”)

Because Musk’s various hyperfixations tend to result in things like large quantities of money moving around, and political leverage being deployed, in support of his various surprisingly-embittered-despite-having-enough-money-that-he-could-just-fuck-off whims, it feels worth noting that he’s complained more than a dozen times on Twitter over the last week or so about Nolan’s movie, suggesting Nyong’o’s casting has “desecrated” Homer’s The Odyssey. That’s since broadened into wider complaints about the Academy’s expanded rules for diversity that went into effect back in 2024, which require that films vying for Best Picture feature significant appearances, both in front of and behind the camera, from underrepresented racial or ethnic groups. And, sure, you could point out that Nolan didn’t seem to have any trouble winning Best Picture and Best Director the year those rules went effect with a nearly uniformly white cast in Oppenheimer, thanks to a number of behind-the-scenes efforts from Universal that include training programs for members of underrepresented groups, plus the presence of people of color in top positions on the film’s production and marketing teams. But what’s a little reality to get in the way of a nice, bias-confirming DEI complaint?

And, hey: It’s not like Musk doesn’t have a point about how Helen’s biography doesn’t entirely line up with Nyong’o’s. After all, Euripedes wrote in 412 BC that Helen was born out of an egg, after Zeus nailed her mom in the form of what was apparently a very fuckable swan—so shouldn’t Nyong’o sport feathers, if she really wanted to embody the part? (Possibly a beak?) This blatant disrespect for the historical and factual canonicity of this mythological woman who hatched out of an egg and did not actually exist is, as serious human beings who really care about the meritocracy of cinema, extremely, personally upsetting to us, and we demand that other people take it just as seriously.