Mark Ruffalo is insisting his criticism of a major Hollywood merger has been twisted into something it's not. The 58-year-old actor posted on X that calling him antisemitic is "appalling and fundamentally dishonest," after Paramount accused him of invoking "antisemitic tropes" while attacking Paramount Skydance's proposed $110 billion merger with Warner Bros. Discovery. As the Guardian reports, Ruffalo on Friday had publicly linked Paramount Skydance, run by David Ellison, and Oracle, the tech company co-founded by Ellison's father, Larry, who is helping fund the merger.
Ruffalo shared a resurfaced clip of Oracle executive vice-chair Safra Catz, who sits on the Paramount Skydance board, describing how the company offered up "some really profoundly scary technology" to "advance the agenda for the Israeli military" after Hamas' Oct. 7 attack. In an Instagram Story, Ruffalo—a vocal advocate for the rights of Palestinians—argued Oracle was powering a "genocide" and warned its technology "will most likely be merged into one of the largest media conglomerates in the world and one day used on you," per USA Today.
A day later, Paramount called the rhetoric troubling, saying that using a term like genocide in reference to a business deal "cheapens" real suffering. The Anti-Defamation League likewise accused Ruffalo of "antisemitic rhetoric," while the Simon Wiesenthal Center backed Paramount, arguing Israel was "completely irrelevant" to the discussion. Ruffalo countered that criticizing Israel's government, a defense contractor, or executives "is not the same as criticizing Jewish people." He says his views come from political beliefs and "should never be interpreted as hostility toward Jewish people, for whom I have deep love and respect." (He previously cast the merger as a threat to free speech.)
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