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Elon Musk made plain his view of an advertiser withdrawal from X, formerly Twitter.
“Don’t advertise,” he advised any marketer with misgivings. “Somebody’s going to try to blackmail me with advertising?! Blackmail me with money? Go f–k yourself. Go. F–k. Yourself. Is that clear? I hope it is.”
Appearing onstage in an awkward and drama-filled session at the New York Times DealBook Summit, Musk had a message to advertisers who object to him or the environment on the social media platform.
Moderator Andrew Ross Sorkin noted that Disney has been among those pausing ads in the wake of Musk’s endorsement of an antisemitic post.
“Hey, Bob,” Musk said. “He’s here in the audience. Sorry, that’s how I feel.”
Sorkin repeatedly asked Musk how the economic model of X/Twitter would be affected by a longer-term advertiser withdrawal.
“What this advertising boycott is going to do is it’s going to kill the company,” he said. “And the whole world will know that those advertisers killed the company. It will be documented in great detail.”
Sorkin said to Musk that advertisers would push back and say that he is a large part of the problem. “Tell it to the judge,” he said. “The judge is the public.”
Asked if the endgame would be that his large following would react against advertisers pulling funds from Twitter with a Bud Light/Target-style boycott against consumer brands, Musk replied, “They already are. Let the chips fall where they may.”
In addition to Iger, former NBCUniversal ad boss Linda Yaccarino was also sitting in the audience for the session at Jazz at Lincoln Center. The exec has been trying to contain damage from Musk’s actions and a growing sense in the ad community that Musk’s free-speech-at-all-costs approach to running the platform has left brands vulnerable. In a report that has prompted a lawsuit by Musk, the advocacy group Media Matters documented cases of ad messages being paired with objectionable posts on X.
Musk acquired Twitter for $44 billion last year, renaming it X and making sweeping changes. During previous advertiser pullbacks, he had sought to reassure them of the viability of X, and the arrival of Yaccarino was interpreted as a step in that direction.
MORE to come ….
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