Lily Wachowski Reflects On Telling Elon Musk And Ivanka Trump “F*** Both Of You”

Few directors have watched their work get pulled into political culture wars quite like Lilly Wachowski. Since co-creating ‘The Matrix’ with her sister Lana in 1999, the film’s central metaphor about waking up from a manufactured reality has taken on a life far beyond the movie itself, evolving into internet shorthand that Wachowski never signed up for.

That tension came to a head back in 2020, when Elon Musk posted a cryptic tweet urging his followers to “take the red pill,” a direct reference to the choice Neo faces early in the film. Ivanka Trump quickly piled on with a one-word reply of “Taken!”, turning a movie reference into a viral political moment almost overnight.

Wachowski’s response at the time was blunt and immediate, firing back with a two-word reply: “F*** both of you.” Years later, she’s now offering a much fuller explanation of why that exchange bothered her so deeply, revisiting the moment in a recent conversation about the film’s legacy.

Speaking with Variety, Wachowski explained that she can’t realistically sit down and walk every single viewer through the film’s actual meaning, arguing that Musk and Trump weren’t genuinely confused about what ‘The Matrix’ represents in the first place. She framed their use of the “red pill” reference as a deliberate act of co-opting rather than an honest misunderstanding, describing it as something she said fascists do by co-opting the messages of progressives, a characterization she shared in comments reported by Variety.

According to Wachowski, that kind of appropriation isn’t limited to her own film. She pointed to how the same tactic has been used with the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr., arguing that similar groups have worked to reshape and redefine what antisemitism means in order to serve their own messaging.

The “red pill” reference itself had already taken on a complicated second life well before Musk’s tweet, having been adopted years earlier by online communities associated with men’s rights activism and, eventually, broader right-wing political movements. That evolution is part of what made Musk and Trump’s exchange feel so pointed to Wachowski, given how far the phrase had already drifted from its original context within the film.

Wachowski didn’t stop at defending the film’s original meaning, either. She also used the conversation to needle the broader entertainment industry for not doing more to support trans actors and creatives, drawing a direct line between Musk and Ivanka Trump’s political messaging and a wider pattern of powerful figures reshaping progressive ideas for their own purposes.

For Wachowski, revisiting this moment years later isn’t just about relitigating an old Twitter spat. It’s part of a broader pattern of her pushing back whenever ‘The Matrix’ gets pulled into political messaging she views as fundamentally at odds with what the film was actually trying to say.

That’s made her one of the more outspoken filmmakers when it comes to correcting the record on how her work gets interpreted, particularly as ‘The Matrix’ has continued to circulate as a reference point in online political discourse more than two decades after its release. Few movies from that era have had their imagery so thoroughly separated from the filmmakers’ original intent, and Wachowski has made clear she isn’t content to simply let that happen without comment.

Whether her explanation changes how people continue to use the “red pill” reference remains to be seen, but it does offer a clearer window into why the moment stuck with her long after the initial exchange faded from headlines. For a filmmaker whose work has become this deeply embedded in political shorthand, it seems unlikely she’s finished weighing in on how it gets used.

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