X sues advertisers over alleged billion-dollar boycott; Elon Musk declares ‘Now it’s battle’

Elon Musk’s social media platform, X, has filed a lawsuit in opposition to a bunch of main advertisers, accusing them of orchestrating a “huge advertiser boycott” that allegedly disadvantaged the corporate of billions in income and violated antitrust legal guidelines. The lawsuit, filed Tuesday in a federal court docket in Texas, targets the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) and its members, together with Unilever, Mars, CVS Well being, and Orsted.
The authorized motion claims that the WFA’s model security initiative, the World Alliance for Accountable Media (GARM), performed a key function in coordinating a pause in promoting following Musk’s $44 billion acquisition of Twitter in late 2022. The go well with alleges that this boycott was a response to Musk’s intensive modifications to Twitter’s employees and insurance policies.
Musk, who rebranded Twitter as X after taking up, took to his platform on Tuesday to touch upon the lawsuit, declaring “now it’s battle” and expressing frustration over what he described as two years of “getting nothing however empty phrases.”

X CEO cites congressional proof
Linda Yaccarino, CEO of X, elaborated on the explanations behind the lawsuit in a video announcement. She cited proof from a US Home Judiciary Committee investigation, suggesting {that a} coordinated “systematic unlawful boycott” had been organized in opposition to X by the businesses named within the lawsuit. The Republican-led committee lately held a listening to to look at whether or not present legal guidelines adequately deter anticompetitive collusion in internet marketing.

The allegations within the lawsuit deal with the preliminary interval after Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, somewhat than a more moderen wave of advertiser withdrawals that occurred in November 2023. Throughout that interval, advertisers started leaving X as a consequence of issues over their advertisements being positioned subsequent to pro-Nazi content material and different types of hate speech on the platform. Tensions escalated additional when Musk himself endorsed an antisemitic conspiracy concept, prompting extra corporations to tug their advertisements.
In response, Musk accused the fleeing advertisers of “blackmail” and, in a profane outburst, instructed them to depart.
Advertisers defend their practices
The Belgium-based WFA, together with CVS, Orsted, Mars, and Unilever, didn’t instantly reply to requests for touch upon Tuesday. Nevertheless, throughout final month’s congressional listening to, a prime Unilever govt defended the corporate’s strategy to promoting.
“Unilever, and Unilever alone, controls our promoting spending,” mentioned Herrish Patel, president of Unilever USA, in ready testimony. “No platform has a proper to our promoting greenback.”
The lawsuit underscores the more and more fraught relationship between Musk’s X and the promoting business, elevating questions on the way forward for model security and the authorized boundaries of coordinated advertiser actions within the digital area.