Elon Musk condemns new Lord of the Rings series: ‘Tolkien is turning in his grave’

‘The Rings of Power’ series premiered on Prime Video on 1 September

Elon Musk has provided his own unfavourable review of Prime Video’s The Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power series.

In a remark which seems to play into his rivalry with Amazon’s billionaire founder Jeff Bezos, the 51-year-old Tesla CEO critiqued the series in a Twitter post on Monday (5 September).

“Tolkien is turning in his grave,” Musk wrote. “Almost every male character so far is a coward, a jerk or both. Only Galadriel is brave, smart and nice.”

The JRR Tolkien-inspired series – which premiered on 1 September – has already fallen victim to “review-bombing” with a Rotten Tomatoes audience score of just 39 per cent at the time of writing.

Meanwhile, the critic score on the popular review-aggregation site sits at a much more impressive 84 per cent.

Read The Independent’s four-star review of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power here.

“The epic drama is set thousands of years before the events of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and will take viewers back to an era in which great powers were forged, kingdoms rose to glory and fell to ruin, unlikely heroes were tested, hope hung by the finest of threads, and the greatest villain that ever flowed from Tolkien’s pen threatened to cover all the world in darkness,” the logline reads.

“Beginning in a time of relative peace, the series follows an ensemble cast of characters, both familiar and new, as they confront the long-feared re-emergence of evil to Middle-earth.”

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is available to stream on Prime Video.