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Elon Musk has urged his 226 million followers on X to cancel their Netflix subscriptions, escalating a fast-building boycott call tied to renewed controversy around the animated series Dead End: Paranormal Park and online claims about the show’s creator, Hamish Steele. The Tesla and SpaceX chief amplified cancellation posts throughout 30 September and 1 October,…
Elon Musk has urged his 226 million followers on X to cancel their Netflix subscriptions, escalating a fast-building boycott call tied to renewed controversy around the animated series Dead End: Paranormal Park and online claims about the show’s creator, Hamish Steele.
The Tesla and SpaceX chief amplified cancellation posts throughout 30 September and 1 October, first replying “Same” after a user shared a screenshot of ending their account and then posting an explicit appeal: “Cancel Netflix for the health of your kids.”
Musk also wrote “This is not ok” in response to a clip of the series recirculating on social media, sharpening the focus of the row over LGBTQ+ representation in children’s programming and the limits of cultural campaign tactics driven by high-profile influencers.
The burst of posts formed a clear sequence. Late on 30 September, Musk engaged with a cancellation screenshot by writing “Same,” signalling he had personally ended his subscription.
On the morning of 1 October, he added the broader call — “Cancel Netflix for the health of your kids” — to his feed, where it drew millions of views within hours and was picked up by conservative accounts encouraging followers to do the same.
Musk’s reach on X has been central to the attention: coverage noted that his audience stands at about 226 million, a scale that can rapidly convert one user’s complaint into a trending campaign.
The controversy reignited around Dead End: Paranormal Park, a 2022 Netflix animated series featuring a transgender teen protagonist that was cancelled after two seasons in 2023 but remains available to stream.
After Libs of TikTok resurfaced a short clip from the show, Musk added his comments, and supporters began framing the series as evidence of what they called inappropriate messaging for children. Business press and trade outlets underscored that the programme is no longer in production, a detail that did little to blunt the momentum behind the boycott calls as screenshots and short videos circulated widely.
In parallel, Steele faced accusations over a separate social-media post purportedly made after the 10 September killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.
Screenshots amplified by critics suggested Steele had mocked the death; Steele publicly rejected those claims and said the narrative being pushed about his remarks and the show’s promotion was untrue. On Bluesky, he wrote: “It’s all lies and slander! Netflix is NOT promoting at the moment!” and indicated he had received a wave of abuse.
His denial became a central part of the downstream coverage as the creator tried to rebut the premise of the boycott while acknowledging the online hostility the dispute had unleashed.
Musk tied his boycott stance to a broader critique of the platform’s alleged impact on children, using the line “for the health of your kids” alongside earlier comments expressing disapproval of the show clip. Some posts that he engaged with also claimed Netflix’s diversity efforts amount to discriminatory practices, a charge reporters noted but could not independently verify.
The emphasis on children’s wellbeing and on content policy helped align the campaign with prior episodes in which Musk positioned himself against what he has called ideological excess in major media and technology institutions.
Market reaction was immediate but modest. By the morning of 1 October in New York, Netflix shares were down roughly 2% in early trading before recovering part of those losses during the session, a move analysts attributed mostly to broader market jitters while acknowledging the visibility of the boycott chatter.
Business publications reported that the company declined to comment on Musk’s posts. Social-media data points showed a jump in searches for “cancel Netflix” and a steady stream of user-shared cancellation screenshots, though the scale of actual churn was unclear and no subscriber data was available.
The series at the centre of the storm premiered in June 2022 and returned for a second season that October before its cancellation was announced in January 2023. Industry reporting at the time documented the decision as part of a broader winnowing of animated titles, and the two seasons — 20 episodes total — remained in the catalogue.
The renewed argument in 2025 underscores how dormant catalogue content can become the subject of contemporary political fights when short clips are reframed to serve a new narrative and when major figures amplify that framing.
News outlets covering Musk’s intervention pointed to the specific language he used as evidence of an unambiguous call for action. “Cancel Netflix for the health of your kids,” he wrote, after earlier acknowledging a user’s cancellation with “Same.” Those two lines were repeatedly embedded in coverage as definitive documentation of both his personal decision and his appeal to others.
Variety, Forbes and other publications also noted his “This is not ok” reply to the circulated clip, placing the posts in a timeline that began on 29 September with initial reactions and culminated on 1 October with the explicit boycott appeal.
Steele’s public responses tried to decouple the show from the claims about him personally and to insist that Netflix was not currently promoting the title. “It’s all lies and slander! Netflix is NOT promoting at the moment!” he wrote, as tallies of shares and comments stacked up beneath the latest posts from Musk and right-leaning influencers.
Newsweek and other outlets quoted the same phrase from Bluesky and reported that the creator said he had been targeted with homophobic and antisemitic emails since the story took off. That account added a second-order thread to the coverage focused on the collateral effects of viral outrage and on the safety of artists caught in a politicised storm.
Musk’s intervention also intersected with investor narratives about the durability of Netflix’s subscription base and the political pressure that brands can face when cultural arguments break into consumer behaviour.
Barron’s and other market watchers cautioned that the stock’s decline coincided with macro factors, including broader volatility, even as the boycott call dominated entertainment and tech headlines for most of the day. Yahoo’s finance desk similarly noted the drop and the volume of cancellation chatter but stopped short of linking price action directly to Musk’s posts in the absence of hard data on churn.
Across mainstream and specialist outlets, Netflix offered no immediate comment on the creator-focused claims or on Musk’s call. That left the public record for the first 24 hours anchored to the documents visible on social media: Musk’s two-line posts, the clip of the show, and Steele’s Bluesky denial.
In that vacuum, reporting tended to emphasise uncontested facts — that the show aired two seasons in 2022, was cancelled in 2023, remains on the service, and stirred controversy after a conservative account re-shared a short segment — while cataloguing the rhetoric of the opposing sides.
The initial wave of coverage also revisited Musk’s history of intervening in culture-war debates and the influence that his X account affords. Business Insider and Forbes documented his “Same” reply and his use of the “Cancel Netflix” phrasing, treating the pair as a shorthand for his involvement.
For supporters of his stance, those posts offered a clear instruction and a measure of solidarity; for critics, they illustrated the outsized role of one platform owner’s personal views in steering mass attention at a single company’s catalogue.
As the argument widened, some reports drew attention to an additional line of criticism related to Netflix’s diversity reporting, with claims that the company’s hiring and commissioning goals constituted discrimination. Outlets that carried those assertions were careful to note that they had not independently verified the materials cited in viral posts.
What remained verified, and widely reproduced, were Musk’s quotes and Steele’s counter-statement, a duelling pair that framed how readers understood both the trigger and the response.
The status of the show itself provided another factual backbone. Deadline’s 2023 cancellation report, which predated the present controversy by more than two years, confirmed there would be no third season, even as the existing episodes continued to be available.
In that sense, the 2025 dispute centred less on an active production decision than on questions about whether a platform should continue to host past content that some viewers object to and whether the conduct of a creator, fairly represented or not, should influence consumer behaviour.
Those are debates that frequently outlast a given news cycle; in the near term, the point of friction was the call to “Cancel Netflix” made by the most-followed individual on the platform where the row ignited.
By late 2 October in London, the trajectory of the story was familiar: an initial video clip, a cascade of influencer commentary, an intervention from Musk that transformed a niche argument into a mainstream headline, and a counter-narrative from the artist in question.
The financial picture was unchanged beyond the minor stock move, and Netflix had not issued a public response.
What remained on record were the quotes that powered the day — “Same”; “This is not ok”; “Cancel Netflix for the health of your kids”; and “It’s all lies and slander! Netflix is NOT promoting at the moment!” — and the concrete programme history showing that the show at issue has not been in production since 2023.
Whether the campaign translates into material subscriber losses for Netflix will take longer to assess, dependent on disclosures the company typically makes at quarter’s end rather than in real time.
For now, the contours of the dispute are set: a streaming platform declining to comment, a creator insisting he has been misrepresented and targeted, and one of the world’s most prominent tech executives using his personal platform to deliver a direct instruction to a mass audience.
As the posts continue to circulate and their language is repeated across headlines and broadcasts, the balance of facts in the public domain remains anchored to the brief statements each principal has made, with Musk’s two-line admonitions and Steele’s short denial defining the edges of a story still unfolding largely on social media rather than through institutional channels.