Jane Fonda, 90, is taking aim at “tech bros,” oligarchs, and billionaires who she believes have taken over America.
Fonda was one of the honorees at Diane von Furstenberg’s DVF Awards on Thursday night as part of the Venice Film Festival. The annual ceremony highlights “extraordinary women,” the DVF website says. At a small press gathering during the event, Fonda took on the egotistical Silicon Valley men she said are destroying the future.
“They want to live forever, while they’re killing the rest of us,” she said. “Most of these guys—these tech bros and these oligarchs and billionaires—they feel that the laws that the rest of us live by don’t matter to them, including the laws of physics. Natural laws. They’re going to live forever.”
Fonda also raised the specific issue of AI robots. She flamed tech billionaires’ bizarre takes on family structures, sounding an alarm about the oppression that could result from their vision.
“Because these guys can’t have babies, they’ll create robots,” Fonda said. “That’ll be their babies, and they’ll just turn the rest of us into tradwives, who have a lot of babies too. Then they’ll take away the vote. Can you believe it? And we’re not going to stand for it.”
Fonda has won two Best Actress Academy Awards, first for the role of Bree Daniels in 1971’s Klute, and then for the role of Sally Hyde in 1979’s Coming Home. She’s also a longtime activist committed to “stopping violence against women and girls” and using her celebrity status “for a purpose greater than myself,” she wrote on her website.
She has advocated for environmental regulations, spoken out against the data center boom, and is a vocal opponent of the Trump administration. She’s sounded alarms on hit television shows, including The Late Show with Stephen Colbert in January following ICE’s violent actions in Minneapolis.
“I’ve had my life. Trump can do nothing to me,” she said. “I’m not scared, but that’s not true for everyone. More and more people are speaking out because their whole lives are at risk right now. AI could take everything away, and then data centers are being put in their neighborhoods, so there’s been a shift in the U.S. Things are changing. Republicans and Democrats alike are saying, ‘No, you’re not going to put a data center in my community.’”
Fonda made her comments at the annual event put on by Diane von Furstenberg, who is married to billionaire media mogul Barry Diller. (Diller is the chairman of People, Inc., which owns a majority stake in the Daily Beast.)
When von Furstenberg told Fonda, “You are so much stronger than you’ve ever been,” Fonda had a quick response.
“Well, I’m almost 90, and so it’s easier to be so,” she said. “I’ve always been brave. I just didn’t always know what to be brave about until my mid-30s. It’s like resilience: You’re either born with it, or you’re not.”
