For someone who's supposedly one of the best businessmen in the world, Elon Musk hasn't been making very good business decisions.
After endorsing a white supremacist conspiracy theory on X, the company's owner has tried everything to stave off accusations of anti-Semitism, including a spontaneous PR trip to Israel. Now, his strategy to return advertisers to the rapidly bleeding platform is to... Play hard to get?
“I don’t want them to advertise,” Musk recently said at the New York Times DealBook Summit in New York. “If someone is going to blackmail me with advertising or money go f**k yourself. Go. F**k. Yourself."
“Is that clear? Hey Bob, if you’re in the audience, that’s how I feel,” he added, referring to Disney CEO Bob Iger, who spoke earlier at the summit on Wednesday.
Elon Musk tells advertisers to F Yourselves
X's biggest advertisers — Apple, IBM, Disney, Comcast/NBC Universal, Lions Gate Entertainment, Warner Bros. Discovery, and Paramount — all confirmed that they are pausing or completely pulling advertisements on the site after a Media Matters report documented their ads appearing next to pro-Nazi content.
The report and subsequent advertiser exodus came after Musk was widely criticized for agreeing with a post pushing white-supremacist conspiracy theories, which stated in part: "Jewish communities have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them."
Musk replied at the time: "You have said the actual truth."
Musk has since filed a "thermonuclear lawsuit" against Media Matters, accusing them of a “blatant smear campaign." His aptly-dubbed "meltdown" came after he returned from Israel, telling advertisers to "go f**k yourself" in the same breath he admitted that this "advertising boycott is gonna kill the company."
Commentators were quick to make fun of Musk for his "bizarre" behavior, including Out100 honoree Kara Swisher, who said during a CNN segment that advertisers not wanting to associate with the company are simply exercising their own First Amendment rights, not infringing upon his.
"This is a 52-year-old man who feels the need to say dirty words to make people shocked," Swisher said. "It's bizarre, and he caused the problem, and he wants to blame them for exercising their First Amendment right not to advertise on his terrible platform."
She continued: "It was a meltdown. ... He's 52 years old and the richest person in the world, and I'm sorry — that's not how adults behave. It's how adult toddlers behave."
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