Elon Musk, Rupert Murdoch No Longer Receiving RBG Award Following Barbra Streisand’s Criticism

Elon Musk, Rupert Murdoch and three other individuals will no longer receive Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s namesake leadership award, presenting organization Opperman Foundation announced late Monday.

The awards’ cancellation came hours after singer and former RBG award recipient Barbra Streisand slammed the decision to honor Musk and Murdoch, and several days after the late justice’s daughter spoke out against the award as well.

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“The last thing we intended was to offend the family and friends of RBG,” said Julie Opperman, chair of the Opperman Foundation, in a statement.

Earlier Monday, Streisand wrote on Instagram that she was joining “the Ginsburg family in condemning the choice of honorees this year. I had the privilege of meeting Justice Ginsburg on several occasions, and I strongly doubt she would approve of these awardees.”

First presented in 2020, the Opperman Foundation changed the title of the RBG honors from the Women of Leadership Award to just the Leadership Award this year, citing a pursuit of gender equality, and four of the five recipients were men. In addition to Musk and Murdoch, the honors included billionaire Michael Milken (known for his dominance of the junk bond market in the 1980s before pleading guilty to securities violations), Sylvester Stallone and Martha Stewart.

Ginsburg’s daughter Jane said in a statement that the choice of winners this year was “an affront to the memory of our mother” and that “the justice’s family wish to make clear that they do not support using their mother’s name to celebrate this year’s slate of awardees and that the justice’s family has no affiliation with and does not endorse these awards.”

Trevor Morrison, law clerk to Jane Ginsburg, wrote in a letter to the foundation that he was “surprised and, frankly, appalled” by the announcement of the honorees.

In her statement, Opperman said the foundation will “reconsider its mission” in the coming months “and make a judgment about how or whether to proceed in the future.”

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