Why is Elon Musk so threatened by the casting of The Odyssey? | Arwa Mahdawi

6 hours ago 9

It was the casting choice that launched a thousand meltdowns. The Oscar-winning actor Lupita Nyong’o was confirmed as Helen of Troy in Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation of Homer’s The Odyssey, and the usual suspects immediately started squealing that the fall of western civilization was nigh.

Elon Musk, a man in possession of the world’s thinnest skin and fattest bank account, is obviously among the aggrieved. Musk started moaning about The Odyssey in January, when it was rumoured that Nyong’o had the role. Since a 12 May interview with Nolan in Time magazine made this casting official, Musk hasn’t stopped whining; he’s spent roughly a week attacking Nyong’o on X and amplifying other angry bigots. His main arguments appear to be that this is a historically inaccurate rendering of a mythological poem; Nyong’o, who was named People magazine’s “Most Beautiful Woman” in 2014, is not sufficiently beautiful; and the casting of a Black woman in a movie nobody is forcing him to watch is inextricably intertwined with a leftwing plot to undermine western society.

I will not massacre your brain cells by subjecting you to a blow-by-blow account of the world’s richest man’s most inane opinions on The Odyssey. But to give you a little flavour, Musk replied “true” to a post on X by conservative commentator Matt Walsh calling Nolan a “coward” for not giving “the most beautiful woman” role to a white woman. “Not one person on the planet actually thinks that Lupita Nyong’o is ‘the most beautiful woman in the world,’” Walsh said.

Musk also replied “true” to a post by a conservative X account called C3 with 323,000 followers, which proclaimed: “The destruction of the Odyssey by Nolan and the Left isn’t just about a movie.” Rather, this anonymous account said: “It’s about western Civilization. The Greeks were its foundation. From Democracy to Art to Philosophy to Culture. The Left wants to destroy western Civilization and everything that helped create it.”

Thanks for the hot take, C3, but kindly get a grip. This is actually just a movie about an imaginary woman featured in a poem written by a dead man. As Jimmy Kimmel joked: “If you really want to get into it, Helen of Troy was half bird. Helen was the daughter of Zeus, who disguised himself as a swan so he could mate with a human woman who then laid an egg and out hatched Helen of Troy … This is made up … So it makes no difference to anyone but crazy angry people what color she was.”

What with all the lawsuits, state trips to China, managing multiple companies and siring scores of kids, you’d think Musk wouldn’t have the time or energy for this nonsense. But, increasingly, it’s all he has time for. The Tesla CEO is obsessed with race; convinced that white people are, to use his own words, “a rapidly dying minority”. And he spends an extraordinary amount of time posting about his fixation on X. A Guardian analysis found that he “posted about how the white race was under threat, made allusions to race science or promoted anti-immigrant conspiracy content on 26 out of 31 days in January”.

“If you stripped Elon Musk’s name off of these [posts] and showed them to me, I would think that this was a white supremacist,” Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, told the Guardian after reviewing a selection of Musk’s utterances.

For reasons that include not wanting to spend hours negotiating with the legal department, I am not going to explicitly call Musk a white supremacist. But I will call him a very sad and bitter man who cannot seem to achieve contentment. Over the years, he appears to have bought himself a new head of hair and reinvented his wardrobe, but his makeover hasn’t fulfilled him. In 2021, Musk wormed his way on to Saturday Night Live, where he made Wario jokes in an attempt to get people to like him. That didn’t appear to bring him peace. Then in 2022, desperate to be loved, he bought Twitter for $44bn and reportedly assembled a team of 80 engineers to tweak the algorithm so more people would see his tweets.

Even that wasn’t enough. After buying an audience, Musk bought an election: he spent more than $290m getting Trump and other Republicans elected in 2024. Since then, he’s had an excellent return on his investment. In October 2024, Musk was worth around $270bn; less than two years later, he is worth about $800bn and will probably become the world’s first trillionaire. Will that make him happy? I doubt it.

Want to know what Musk is doing on X when he isn’t being deeply weird about Nyong’o? According to a new analysis by the Washington Post, he’s spent more time in 2026 interacting with an anonymous account called “XFreeze” than with any other user. It’s unclear who is behind XFreeze, though it appears to have ties to India, but the account spends a lot of time heaping praise on Musk, which the tech mogul adores.

“Musk loves to be glazed, and this person is the doughnut factory,” Joan Donovan, assistant professor of journalism and emerging media studies at Boston University, told the Post.

God, it’s tragic isn’t it? Musk has all those children he could be hanging out with, and here he is posting about celebrities not being white enough for him, and engaging in an online bromance with an obsequious anonymous account. He may love to be glazed, but clearly nothing is going to fill that gaping hole in his soul.