Speaking at the New York Times’ annual DealBook conference Wednesday, billionaire Elon Musk encouraged advertisers who have left X in response to his recent antisemitic posts to leave the platform.
“If somebody’s going to try to blackmail me with advertising? Blackmail me with money? Go fuck yourself. Go. Fuck. Yourself,” Musk said. “Is that clear?”
In the same breath, Musk called out Disney (DIS) – Get Free Report CEO Bob Iger, saying: “Hey Bob, if you’re in the audience: That’s how I feel. Don’t advertise.”
A number of brands, including NBCUniversal, Comcast, Lionsgate and Warner Bros. Discovery, recently suspended their advertising efforts on the platform.
Musk went on to say that the current “advertising boycott is going to kill the company.”
“The whole world,” he said, “will know that those advertisers killed the company.”
Musk, a fierce proponent of free speech, said in May that he’ll “say what I want, and if the consequence of that is losing money, so be it.”
Iger, speaking at the summit earlier in the day, said that he had “a lot of respect” for Musk, but defended Disney’s decision to pull ads all the same.
“By him taking the position that he took in quite a public manner, we just felt that the association with that position and Elon Musk and X was not necessarily a positive one for us, and we decided we would pull our advertising,” he said.
X CEO Linda Yaccarino defended Musk’s comments, saying that the platform is “enabling an information independence that’s uncomfortable for some people.”
Related: Investors have finally had enough of Tesla CEO Elon Musk
Tom Rogers, the media executive who founded CNBC, told the network Thursday that “advertisers have a right to speak,” saying that any advertiser has the right to avoid objectionable content.
Rogers added that X’s current issues with advertising point to a bigger problem: the kind of programmatic advertising that often places ads next to content the advertiser would rather not be associated with.
“When I taught sales at Goldman Sachs, sometimes I thought about reverse psychology; I never thought about spitting on the advertiser,” Jim Cramer, host of “Mad Money,” said Thursday. “This would be more than spitting.”
Cramer questioned what Yaccarino could say to advertisers, following Musk’s outburst, to bring them back to the platform.
“He’s unfiltered. He answers to no one,” Cramer said, acknowledging at the same time that Musk “obviously has tremendous prowess.”
Musk spoke with New York Times columnist Andrew Sorkin at the annual DealBook Summit Wednesday.
Slaven Vlasic/Getty Images
“Look, he said it: this is a brain that people will study for a long time because it’s a brain that works against himself at the same time,” Cramer said. “It’s not an unusual mental condition that this man has.”
Musk in recent months has sued or threatened to sue organizations including Media Matters, the Center for Countering Digital Hate, and the Anti-Defamation League, claiming that their efforts are solely responsible for Twitter’s ongoing advertiser exodus.
Gary Black, managing partner of The Future Fund and a prominent Tesla (TSLA) – Get Free Report bull, criticized Musk’s outburst as pulling attention away from Thursday’s Cybertruck launch event.
“Really? Why curse out your customers? Elon should sell Twitter to another media entity,” Black wrote. “He seems to hate his customers, the advertisers. Unbelievable.”
Contact Ian with tips via email, [email protected], or Signal 732-804-1223.
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