On Sunday, Elon Musk told his 34.3 million Twitter followers to "take the red pill." The message was on-brand for Musk, though relatively anodyne considering some of the more bonkers things he's done in recent months (like open his Tesla factory against state orders, drop Tesla stock after tweeting the price was "too high," and name his kid X Æ A-12...good luck with that one future subs).
Shortly after Musk sent that out, Ivanka Trump said that she'd taken hers:
For those who aren't extremely online, the overused internet expression that is "take the red pill," or some variation of it, is a concept bogarted from The Matrix. In that film the protagonist, Neo (Keanu Reeves), learns he's living in a computer simulation and has the opportunity to "take the red pill" to learn the truth about what's going on, or "take the blue pill" to go back to how things were and forget what happened.
In modern internet parlance, it usually means to open one's eyes to the "truth" (the definition of that may vary) and often has something to do with embracing conservative political beliefs. In this instance we'll just let Dictionary.com define the slang since defining things is supposed to be their 9-to-5:
Red pill and blue pill have become slang for accepting truth even though it’s difficult, or rejecting it to cling to a comfortable falsehood.
Hopefully that helps.
Anyway, Matrix co-creator Lilly Wachowski (who it is very clear does not see eye-to-eye with Trump nor Musk on most/probably almost all political issues) responded, tweeting "fuck both of you." This would appear to indicate her displeasure:
See.
Anyone drawn into the tweet, which looks like a lot of people, was also encouraged by Wachowski to donate to the LGBTQ social service Brave Space Alliance.
We'll update this when the people behind Total Recallget involved.
