In response to a dispute involving an animated series and its creator, Elon Musk this week urged his followers to terminate their Netflix accounts.
Tesla said on his X platform on Wednesday, “Cancel Netflix for the health of your kids.” The message was a reaction to a picture that accused Netflix of pursuing a “transgender woke agenda.”
Conservative criticism of the Netflix animated series “Dead End: Paranormal Park,” which includes a transgender character, appears to be the initial cause of the dispute. After two seasons, the program was canceled in 2023.
Along with a number of anti-trans messages, Musk also addressed a post that criticized the show’s creator, Hamish Steele, for allegedly saying things that a well-known conservative X account claimed “mocked” the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.
To Musk’s criticism on rival social media site Bluesky, Steele replied, “It’s probably going to be a very odd day.” In addition, Steele shared a post by TV writer Jack Bernhardt describing “Dead End” as a “brilliant show about kind, wonderful characters.”
In a post this week, Robby Starbuck, a well-known conservative activist, echoed anti-trans views and claimed that Netflix had propagated an ideology that was “hateful to White Americans.” In one of his X postings on Netflix, Starbucks, which has been disparaging big businesses for their diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives in recent months, stated, “No one should give this woke company another dime.”
CNBC reached out to Netflix for comment, but the company did not reply.
According to analysts, Netflix may not be as threatened by the backlash as Musk may have hoped.
Before prioritizing income over user growth, Netflix last published the number of members in the fourth quarter of 2024, which came to 301.63 million. The market value of the corporation is over $490 billion, and over 60% of its shares has increased in the last year.
Over the week, shares dropped by about 5%.
“Will that necessarily make a difference? Guy Adami, a CNBC contributor, stated on “Fast Money” on Wednesday that “you’re going to see people sign up on the back of that to counter it.”
“I don’t think this is a reason to sell the stock,” he stated.
According to Alicia Reese of Wedbush Securities, the remarks were made too late in the third quarter to have a significant effect on subscriber numbers, as she told CNBC.
She stated, however, that she doesn’t think the criticism will have a significant effect and that any negative effects will be compensated for by a rise in ad income.
“Their numbers should come out just fine,” Reese told them. “I think that shares haven’t been hit too hard.”
Although a day of headlines can cause the stock to fluctuate, Tim Seymour of Seymour Asset Management stated that Netflix shares are ultimately too costly to be greatly impacted by online criticism.
“We’ve had these moments in time where, whether it was an ad campaign that went wrong or whether it was some sense that a company was aligned in a particular political channel… I don’t think that that’s going to be the reason to sell Netflix here,” Seymour stated Wednesday.
The boycott demands are similar to those made against Anheuser-Busch InBev in 2023 following the introduction of an advertising campaign featuring transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney. Karen Finerman, a CNBC contributor, pointed out on Wednesday that the boycott of Bud Light caused “far greater” damage than any other recent instances.
According to Finerman, “I feel like this will be very fleeting,”
