Once you make something and release it into the wild, you no longer have control over it, a fact no creator is more acutely aware of, and presumably bummed by, than Matrix filmmaker Lilly Wachowski. Well, maybe the guy who drew Pepe the Frog, but Wachowski is the creator who had a special message for Elon Musk and Ivanka Trump on Sunday when the former encouraged his followers to “take the red pill,†a reference to the 1999 smash action movie Wachowski directed with sister Lana Wachowski.
In The Matrix, taking a red pill allows Keanu Reeves’s protagonist, Neo, to recognize that he, along with the rest of humanity, is trapped inside a computer-generated reality. In the parlance of our times, the red pill typically refers to men’s rights activists or, more broadly, any assortment of conservative and conspiracy ideologies. Based on Elon Musk’s recent behavior, his red pill presumably refers to breaking quarantine in the face of the coronavirus pandemic. Either way, Lilly Wachowksi has a message for his misuse of The Matrix, and for Ivanka’s endorsement retweet, which you can read below.