Butters vs. the Billionaires
A teaser for the next South Park installment appeared at the same moment President Trump was addressing reporters at the White House and lauding the artificial intelligence efforts of Meta's Mark Zuckerberg, SpaceX's Elon Musk, Nvidia chief Jensen Huang and Anthropic's Dario Amodei. The overlap seemed deliberate. According to the Season 29, Episode 6 synopsis, Butters is displeased about the data centers billionaires are putting up in our backyards. In the footage, a pest control worker tells Butters at his door that he hears billionaires have taken over the backyard, and Butters answers that these foolish billionaires keep multiplying. A still from the episode shows Butters outside with the exterminator, who wears a poison tank and grips a sprayer wand.[S1]
Hollywood's Data Center Anxiety
Data centers are a contentious subject nationwide, and nowhere more so than in Hollywood, where labor groups and employees worry about losing jobs, while writers and directors voice anxiety about the effect on their craft. One of the largest figures in the scramble for data center sites is Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, who also provided financing for the Paramount-WBD transaction. South Park is broadcast on Comedy Central, a Paramount property. Once again, the show's creators seem willing to criticize the very company that pays them.[S1]
Ruffalo's Rebuke and Paramount's Response
Mark Ruffalo was among those who spoke out against bringing what he described as deeply frightening technology into Hollywood, and against the possible effects of AI on media companies that will soon belong to Larry Ellison and his son David. Ruffalo characterized Larry as a textbook oligarch, saying such people grind down workers and pool the planet's wealth to secure their own power and dominance. Paramount fired back, saying Ruffalo leaned on antisemitic stereotypes, particularly by connecting the Ellisons' purchase of the studio with Oracle's dealings with the Israeli military.[S1]
