Jaymie Johns
Media & Technology Morality Analyst
This Isn’t Comedic or Bold. It’s Moral Corruption — And You’re Funding It.
October 1, 2025
by Jaymie Johns
The Scene
In the fourth episode of Gen V, an Amazon Prime original, there is a scene so vile it should have sparked widespread cancellations and boycotts. Instead, the public response has been disturbingly muted. The sequence begins with Dean Cipher, played by P.J. Byrne, wheeling in a live goat that bleats softly in confusion. “I can’t,” says Marie Moreau (Jaz Sinclair). “You absolutely can,” Cipher replies. “Elon here is no different than a bag of blood.” Marie hesitates: “What if I kill Elon?” Cipher answers without pause: “That’s why we name them for assholes.” After a brief diversion in dialogue, he delivers the line that strips away any ambiguity: “Now, what do you say you levitate Elon Musk?” Only then is the goat’s full name revealed. Marie lifts it into the air, and its bleats of fear turn hoarse and guttural as she manipulates its blood. The animal convulses, screaming in agony, before exploding into a spray of gore — limbs scattering across the room. Cipher, utterly unfazed, orders the next victim: a pig named “Julia Fox.” This is not satire. It is a vile act of dehumanization, glorifying suffering and normalizing violence against a real person’s proxy — a moral obscenity that should boil the blood of anyone still capable of outrage.
Primetimer described the “shock” of “blowing up a goat named Elon Musk,” while Metro highlighted fans who were “shocked and delighted” by the “brutal barb.” Delighted? There is nothing delightful about sadism paraded as storytelling. On Reddit, users lamented that “Goat Elon Musk didn’t deserve his fate,” as though not-goat Elon Musk somehow does.
YouTube commentators admitted it was “the one that almost went too far.” Almost?
Amazon must be held accountable for this filth — not merely for hosting it, but for creating it. This is a Prime Original, which means the company commissioned the script, approved its revisions, instructed actors to speak these words, filmed the scene (likely over multiple takes to capture every reaction), edited the footage, screened the final cut, and still decided to release it. At no point in that long chain of decisions did anyone say, “This is too far.” That’s not passive complicity; it is deliberate moral rot. The anger expressed in these scattered corners of the internet is justified, but it is far too small. A scene this depraved should provoke a tidal wave of revulsion, not a few disbelieving comments and a handful of weak posts.
The Line That Should Never Be Crossed
Dark fiction like American Psycho or Fight Club uses violence as a reflection of society, forcing us to confront its darkness without glorifying it. The Gen V goat scene does the opposite — it’s a repulsive indulgence in sadism, devoid of any higher purpose. Cipher’s dismissal of the goat’s first innocent bleat curdles into mockery as its sounds become hoarse, agonized cries during the blood manipulation, dragging out the suffering for shock’s sake. Even Marie’s hesitation feels less like conscience and more like a cruel tease, quickly crushed by the rush to gore that the show treats as a joke.
This goes far beyond satire — it is a disgusting moral failure, one that weaponizes humor to degrade and dehumanize. “Elon Musk,” a name synonymous with revolutionary leaps in space exploration and artificial intelligence, is reduced here to an “asshole” stand-in for torture. “That’s why we name them for assholes” isn’t witty. It’s cruelty masquerading as cleverness, a sneering verdict aimed at a man whose boldness has advanced humanity itself. On X, @PeterBergM tagged Musk and wrote, “Should we cancel Prime Video too? I just saw a scene in Gen V season 2 where they just blew up a goat named ‘Elon Musk’ 🤣🤣🤣 They HATE you!” That reaction says everything. This isn’t satire speaking truth to power — it’s spectacle inviting contempt. And when media stoops to this level, it doesn’t challenge power. It corrupts the audience, erodes empathy, and moves us closer to a world where real harm becomes easier to justify.
Complicity and Convenience
We watch the horror unfold — the innocent bleat twisting into screams of torment — and what do we do? Almost nothing. The response has been shamefully small. The few people who spoke about it on X were livid: “Vile, disgusting, and beyond inappropriate! Gen V S2E4 names a goat ‘Elon Musk’ only to explode it in sickening gore. Associating Elon Musk’s name with gross imagery, animal cruelty, and mockery sends a message encouraging violence against him” (@Marion202501). “That’s human-despising trash! Something like that doesn’t belong in any TV series: indirect hate and a call to murder a real person… Shame on you, NETFLIX and AMAZON! 🤮🤮🤮 #ElonMusk” (@ChrisNoeth). “Why is Amazon Prime allowing content that incites violence toward Elon Musk?” (@iam_smx), and “You can’t condone and encourage the brutal murder of someone and still expect me to pay you.” (@Sue_Zan404).
But for every post like those, memes circulate celebrating the “satisfying” splatter. Subscriptions remain steady. The anger in these corners is righteous, but it is a whisper when it should be a roar. As of October 3, 2025, #Primeless has garnered thousands of views — but no surge, no boycott, no mass cancellation. That limp response is the real disgrace: an acknowledgment of evil without any action to stop it, leaving Amazon free to profit from poison.
Amazon’s trick is simple — and devastatingly effective. It pairs the repulsive with the convenient, and people choose comfort over conscience. It mocks corporate control in Gen V while embodying it in reality, Bezos’s machine bankrolling violent caricatures of Musk while hiding behind free shipping. That weak backlash is fuel for them, not friction. Only a mass walkout can wound; Prime needs a purge.
Normalizing Violence Against Real People
“It’s just a show,” some say, hiding behind the excuse as if fiction exists in a vacuum. But stories shape us: they teach us what to hate, what to laugh at, what to excuse. When a goat named “Elon” screams in agony and is ripped apart for laughs, it stops being a scene confined to a screen — it becomes permission. It tells audiences that cruelty toward the man behind the name isn’t just acceptable, it’s funny.
That’s the danger. It begins as a joke and curdles into justification. The idea that “assholes” deserve suffering creeps in quietly, planted in entertainment long before it flowers into real-world violence. History shows how mockery morphs into malice — ridicule has paved the road to persecution more often than we like to admit. Yet Amazon persists, normalizing the notion that those who challenge power deserve to be killed, and violently so.
This isn’t satire punching up; it’s contempt disguised as comedy — and it corrodes something far deeper than taste. It erodes the reflex to see people as people and itt primes a culture to cheer as dissenters are treated as disposable, their pain dismissed as entertainment. The true obscenity isn’t the blood spattered across the screen. It’s the erosion of empathy beneath it, engineered by a corporation that knows exactly what it’s doing — and does it anyway.
The Vacuum of Integrity in Modern Media
Amazon Prime stands at the center of modern media — a trillion-dollar giant whose influence dwarfs the Hollywood studios that once defined entertainment. And with that immense power, it has chosen not to elevate culture or deepen public discourse, but to profit from cruelty. Gen V has funneled billions into Prime’s bottom line while cloaking its sadism in the language of social commentary. There is nothing bold about a corporation spending its vast resources to ridicule and dehumanize a man who has pushed civilization forward. This isn’t critique. It’s bitterness — a multitrillion-dollar empire sanctioning cruelty and congratulating itself for being “edgy.”
Step back and the pattern is impossible to ignore. Across the media landscape, scandal isn’t a by-product — it’s the product. Netflix has repeatedly platformed the sexualization of children and pushed aggressive ideological narratives under the guise of “representation.” Amazon, meanwhile, normalizes humiliation as entertainment and dresses malice up as art. The strategy is simple and devastating: manufacture outrage, discard integrity, and condition audiences to accept what they once would have rejected outright. And no one has perfected that model more ruthlessly than Amazon — a corporation that uses convenience to dull moral instinct, spectacle to normalize cruelty, and sheer scale to make the unacceptable feel inevitable.
A culture that cheers this on isn’t progressing is decaying. Its moral core is being hollowed out and sold back to it as content. And unless that decay is met with refusal — with millions saying no more — the next atrocity won’t shock us. It will simply be the new normal.
Exodus
Silence makes you complicit. Every subscription, every renewal, every second of watch time is fuel — not just for the company, but for the worldview it’s selling. What we choose to watch funds the assault on decency. Boycotts aren’t symbolic gestures; they are how ordinary people reclaim power.
“I don’t watch that show” is not a defense. Your subscription still funds the people who made it — and they read your payment as approval. If you keep Prime, your money says do it again.
We’ve seen it before. Netflix bled subscribers and saw its stock drop 2.4% after Elon Musk posted “Cancel Netflix” more than twenty times in a matter of days over its disturbing children’s content. If outrage over that sparked a mass departure, then this — the graphic torture and execution of a proxy bearing Musk’s name — demands a tidal wave. The small but furious reaction so far, calling the scene “human-despising trash” and a “call to murder,” is a start. Fans sharing boycott links add fuel. But sparks alone die out. What’s needed is a surge — millions canceling Prime, tanking its value, and forcing the company to confront the consequences of its choices.
A sweeping boycott now isn’t about revenge. It’s a demonstration that targeting people who don’t fall in line is where we draw the line.
I canceled my Prime membership the moment I saw that clip. A while later, I realized that cancelling Prime would mean that I can’t watch the series finale of Good Omens, which is my absolute favorite show. But the conclusion of a decades-long story still isn’t worth my soul.
