Elon Musk has announced a “thermonuclear lawsuit” against the organization Media Matters. He will file the lawsuit in a “split second” when the courts open on Monday. In a post on his social network As a result, more and more major advertising clients, including Apple, IBM and Disney, stopped advertising on X on Friday.
In his post, Musk emphasized defending the right to freedom of expression. This includes “the freedom to see or hear things that some might find offensive.” He called Media Matters an “activist group” that “attacks” X by deceiving advertisers and thereby damaging X’s revenue. The organization’s report only came about through targeted curation of the timeline and repeated loading of the page. The “rare case” occurred in which advertising appeared alongside right-wing content. According to data from X, the corresponding advertising was seen almost exclusively or exclusively by Media Matters in the context of the criticized posts.
Media Matters showed how advertising from IBM, Apple and the software company Oracle, among others, appeared on X alongside posts with positive statements about Adolf Hitler and the ideology of the National Socialists. As a result, the computer giant IBM also paused its advertising on X. According to the New York Times, the company planned to spend $1 million there this quarter. In addition, other major advertising customers, such as Paramount and the Warner Group, have stopped their advertising, according to media reports. The film studio Lionsgate also confirmed that ads on the platform had been suspended.
Another scandal over an anti-Semitic post
In addition, Musk caused a controversy with support for an anti-Semitic post, which earned him sharp criticism from the White House, among other things. The post on Musk wrote about the post on Wednesday that it contained the “actual truth.”
In later statements, Musk did not back down from his position, but only qualified it a little: He was referring to “some groups” such as the Jewish organization Anti-Defamation League (ADL) that “actually spread anti-white racism and anti-Asian racism.” . At the same time, he reiterated that, in his view, there was a problem with racism against whites.
Musk is defiant
On Friday, Musk continued to be defiant. “Many of the largest advertising customers are the biggest oppressors of your right to freedom of expression,” he wrote to his followers at Musk called Media Matters “pure evil.”
X’s economic situation is already difficult. Musk admitted several times that advertising revenue was only about half as high as it was during the Twitter era. He is trying to make more money through subscription offers. According to experts, this cannot yet come close to compensating for the loss of advertising revenue.
At the same time, Musk is – at least on paper – still the richest person in the world and, according to calculations by the financial service Bloomberg, currently has assets of around $219 billion. However, the vast majority of this consists of his holdings in the electric car manufacturer Tesla, which he leads, and his space company SpaceX. For the $44 billion purchase of Twitter in October last year, Musk had to sell Tesla shares and also take out loans of around $13 billion. These loans now burden X and, according to media reports, servicing them costs around a billion dollars per year.
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