Space X and Tesla CEO Elon Musk seems to forever be in the news for getting into online scraps with anyone he can, whether it be world leaders like Britain’s prime minister or his own daughter.
But his latest bit of beef has escaped the confines of the internet, and has hit a federal court in Texas.
X, the social media company he bought in October 2022, yesterday filed a lawsuit against the World Federation of Advertisers and member companies Unilever, Mars, CVS Health and Orsted for allegedly orchestrating what its CEO Linda Yaccarino called a ‘systematic illegal boycott.’
Musk for his part posted about the lawsuit on X on Tuesday, saying ‘now it is war’ after two years of being nice and ‘getting nothing but empty words.’
But his lawsuit came just nine months after he told fleeing advertisers to ‘go f*** yourself’ in a bizarre tirade at a major business conference.
Musk, 53, told The New York Times DealBook Summit in November 2023: ‘Don’t advertise. If someone is going to try and blackmail me with advertising? Blackmail me with money? Go f— yourself.’
Musk, 53, (pictured, right) told The New York Times DealBook Summit in November 2023: ‘Don’t advertise. If someone is going to try and blackmail me with advertising? Blackmail me with money? Go f— yourself’
X CEO Linda Yaccarino (pictured) said advertisers were engaged in a a ‘systematic illegal boycott.’
Musk posted about the lawsuit on X on Tuesday, saying ‘now it is war’
Referring to Bob Iger, the Disney CEO who had previously talked about pulling advertising from X, Musk said: ‘Go f— yourself, is that clear? Hey Bob, if you’re in the audience. That’s how I feel, don’t advertise.’
Despite this, he also admitted that an advertiser boycott would seriously damage X’s business prospects.
‘What this advertising boycott is going to do is, it is going to kill the company’, he moaned.
‘And the whole world will know that those advertisers killed the company’, Musk added.
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In November 2023, about a year after Mr Musk bought the company, a number of advertisers began fleeing X over concerns about their ads showing up next to pro-Nazi content and hate speech on the site in general, with the billionaire inflaming tensions with his own posts endorsing an antisemitic conspiracy theory.
Elon Musk, pictured in April this year, has declared ‘war’ on a group of advertisers by launching a lawsuit over an alleged ‘illegal boycott’ of his social media platform X
Linda Yaccarino, chief executive officer of X, said in a video announcement that the lawsuit stemmed in part from evidence uncovered by the US House Judiciary Committee which she said showed a ‘group of companies organised a systematic illegal boycott’ against the platform.
The Republican-led committee had a hearing last month looking at whether current laws are ‘sufficient to deter anti-competitive collusion in online advertising’.
Ms Yaccarino claimed the advertising group ‘directly organised boycotts and used other indirect tactics to target disfavoured platforms, content creators, and news organisations in an effort to demonetise and, in effect, limit certain choices for consumers’.
‘The consequence — perhaps the intent — of this boycott was to seek to deprive X’s users, be they sports fans, gamers, journalists, activists, parents or political and corporate leaders, of the Global Town Square,’ she wrote.
‘To put it simply, people are hurt when the marketplace of ideas is undermined and some viewpoints are not funded over others as part of an illegal boycott.’
Ms Yaccarino added that ‘the illegal behaviour of these organisations and their executives cost X billions of dollars’ and branded it as a ‘stain on a great industry’.
