Tesla and SpaceX CEO and prospective Twitter owner Elon Musk has addressed the recent slump in Netflix’s stock, apparently blaming the decline on the proliferation of “woke” content on the platform.
“The woke mind virus is making Netflix unwatchable,” Musk posted on Twitter Tuesday in reply to a report that Netflix shares had cratered in response to the company’s most recent quarterly earnings report.
Musk’s comments arrive on the heels of a major downturn for Netflix’s stock, which has undergone a dramatic fall from grace in recent months owing to low subscriber growth.
The latest earnings report attested to what many investors believe is a dire sign for the platform. For the first time in over ten years, Netflix reported a net decline in paid subscriptions to the platform, with about 200,000 fewer Netflix users than indicated by the previous quarterly report.
In the beginning, Netflix was a platform that facilitated the delivery of DVDs by mail, allowing subscribers access to a wide inventory of new and old titles on the physical medium.
Reflecting changes in the home movie industry, Netflix launched its streaming service in 2007, which quickly became the main priority of the business (in 2011, the DVD service was split off from the streaming service).
In 2013, Netflix began its pivot to original content with the company’s first in-house series, the wildly successful “House of Cards,” paving the way for future hits such as “Tiger King,” “Stranger Things,” and “Bridgerton.”
However, it seems that Netflix—as the company’s stock performance in recent months seems to suggest—has fallen victim to its own hype. The value of Netflix stock has declined 63.47 percent YTD as of writing, with the most severe drop occurring on April 20 in response to the company’s aforementioned quarterly report.
In recent years, Netflix has increasingly emphasized progressive ideological messages in its original content, giving priority to movies and television series focusing on identitarian grievances. Amid the fire and tumult of the 2020 George Floyd riots, Netflix added a “Black Lives Matter” section to its genre tab, slotted snugly in the alphabetical list between “Anime” and “British” (the “Black Lives Matter” genre has subsequently been renamed “Black Stories”).
However, Netflix has also elicited criticism from social progressives for some of these “Black Stories”—namely, the black stories told by African-American comedian Dave Chappelle in his recent Netflix-exclusive specials. Chappelle drew particular criticism for his recent release “The Closer”, in which the comedian critiques certain features of gender ideology and LGBT culture.
The controversy over “The Closer” was followed by numerous company leaks from disgruntled employees and calls to boycott the platform. The controversy prompted Jaclyn Moore, transgender co-showrunner of the racially-focused series “Dear White People”, to leave the company, citing the ostensibly “blatantly and dangerously transphobic content” featured on “The Closer”. However, the company ultimately stood by the special, refusing calls to remove “The Closer” and other Chappelle content from the Netflix library.
The premise which underlies Musk’s pronouncements is summarized by the widely circulated maxim, “Get woke, go broke.” The thinking goes that such propagandistic fare is alienating to consumers, who are prone to reject brands that attempt to moralize to them about social and political issues.
One looking for a counter-example to Musk’s remarks might point to the success of Netflix’s “Bridgerton”, a Regency-era period drama with an implausibly diverse cast of multiracial English aristocrats. However, though “woke” programming may succeed on an individual level, this does not necessarily entail that the dominance of such ideological fare has alienated audiences.
Netflix has alternative ideas to explain its declining membership: The company placed the blame on its withdrawal from Russia in protest of the country’s recent invasion of Ukraine, which it claims was responsible for the loss of 700,000 Russian subscribers.
