Mark Ruffalo pushed back Saturday against Paramount after the studio accused him of invoking antisemitic tropes, calling the charge “appalling and fundamentally dishonest” as his monthslong campaign against the company’s proposed acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery took a sharper turn.
The clash began when Ruffalo shared a 2024 clip on Instagram of Safra Catz, then Oracle’s chief executive and now a Paramount Skydance board member, describing technology the company supplied to the Israeli military after the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack. Ruffalo wrote that Oracle’s tools would likely end up folded into “one of the largest media conglomerates in the world” and accused Catz of reveling in what he called a genocide built on an apartheid system of oppression. He also branded Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, whose son David Ellison runs Paramount, a “classic oligarch,” warning that the $111 billion merger would concentrate dangerous power over CNN, HBO and Warner Bros.
Paramount responded with an unusually lengthy statement rejecting the framing. A company spokesperson said the studio remains troubled whenever antisemitic tropes surface in a business dispute, adding that terms like genocide and apartheid, applied to a corporate transaction, trivialize the suffering those words describe. The company said it did not intend to engage further and instead urged a lower temperature in the debate.
Ruffalo responded Saturday morning on X, arguing that criticizing the Israeli government, a military technology contract, or the executives behind it is not equivalent to attacking Jewish people. He said his opposition stems from his own political convictions, not hostility toward Jewish people, and credited Jewish friends and colleagues with shaping his understanding of activism. He maintained that scrutiny of the Ellison family’s influence over the merger, including its financial ties to Oracle’s surveillance and government-contracting business, remains fair given the stakes for journalists and workers across the industry.
The exchange drew swift reactions from Jewish advocacy groups. Simon Wiesenthal Center chief executive Jim Berk praised Paramount for what he called a refusal to let prejudice hide behind political criticism, while Creative Community for Peace’s Ari Ingel accused Ruffalo of merging opposition to Israel with tropes about Jewish-linked wealth and media control. Anti-Defamation League head Jonathan Greenblatt also criticized the actor’s remarks.
Ruffalo has been among the most vocal Hollywood opponents of the merger, having testified before a Senate hearing and signed a letter alongside hundreds of industry figures urging regulators to block the deal, which studio executives say now awaits resolution of an antitrust suit brought by a coalition of state attorneys general.
