Musk and X launch legal action over ‘massive advertiser boycott’

Elon Musk’s social media platform X has sued a group of advertisers, alleging that a “massive advertiser boycott” deprived the company of billions of dollars in revenue and violated antitrust laws.

The company formerly known as Twitter filed the lawsuit on Tuesday in a federal court in Texas against the World Federation of Advertisers and member companies Unilever, Mars, CVS Health and Orsted.

It accused the advertising group’s initiative called the Global Alliance for Responsible Media of helping to co-ordinate a pause in advertising after Mr Musk bought Twitter for 44 billion US dollars (£34.62 billion) in late 2022 and overhauled its staff and policies.

Mr Musk posted about the lawsuit on X on Tuesday, saying “now it is war” after two years of being nice and “getting nothing but empty words”.

Linda Yaccarino, chief executive officer of X, said in a video announcement that the lawsuit stemmed in part from evidence uncovered by the US House Judiciary Committee which she said showed a “group of companies organised a systematic illegal boycott” against X.

The Republican-led committee had a hearing last month looking at whether current laws are “sufficient to deter anti-competitive collusion in online advertising”.

The lawsuit’s allegations centre on the early days of Mr Musk’s Twitter takeover and not a more recent dispute with advertisers that came a year later.

In November 2023, about a year after Mr Musk bought the company, a number of advertisers began fleeing X over concerns about their ads showing up next to pro-Nazi content and hate speech on the site in general, with Mr Musk inflaming tensions with his own posts endorsing an antisemitic conspiracy theory.

Mr Musk later said those fleeing advertisers were engaging in “blackmail” and, using a profanity, essentially told them to go away.