Elon Musk in 2018 Photo: Craig Bailey, Florida Today / USA TODAY NETWORK via IMAGN
History will record another milestone in Elon Musk’s sad descent from high-tech innovator to stumblebum troll with the news that he’s suing one-time advertisers for agreeing that X is a lousy place to advertise.
Musk claims it’s a conspiracy aimed at destroying the social media platform formerly known as Twitter after Musk destroyed it himself with a cascade of inept decision-making and right-wing platforming.
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On Tuesday, X filed a federal antitrust lawsuit against GARM, the Global Alliance for Responsible Media. The alliance was created in 2019 by the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) to set standards around brand safety for digital advertisers.
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The lawsuit accuses the industry coalition and its members—including CVS Health, Mars, and Unilever— of abusing its influence over marketers and ad agencies to discriminate unfairly against X, prompting an ad boycott.
A copy of the lawsuit obtained by Axios alleges the group triggered “a massive advertiser boycott” when it conveyed to its members concerns about compliance at Twitter, now X, after Musk acquired the platform in 2022.
“These actions were all against the unilateral self-interest of the advertisers; they made economic sense only in furtherance of a conspiracy performed in the confidence that competing advertisers were doing the same,” the complaint reads.
X CEO and former NBC exec Linda Yaccarino echoed the lawsuit’s claims on Tuesday in an open letter to advertisers.
The coalition’s “behavior is a stain on a great industry, and cannot be allowed to continue,” Yaccarino wrote.
“It’s also clear that there are likely others who suffered at the hands of this activity. This case is about more than damages—we have to fix a broken ecosystem that allows this illegal activity to occur,” Musk’s water carrier added without irony after her boss single-handedly broke the profitable ecosystem formerly known as Twitter.
X expects to earn roughly $2 billion in advertising revenue this year, according to a source, down from $4.5 billion in revenue the year before Musk’s acquisition of the global microblogging social network.
X contends in the lawsuit that the boycott and its effects “continue to this day, despite X applying brand safety standards comparable to those of its competitors and which meet or exceed those specified by GARM.”
The admission is just confirmation that the damage following Musk’s intervention is done, and X is irretrievable.
