As Musk faced renewed accusations of antisemitism last month, several major companies — including Disney, Apple, IBM, Comcast, Lionsgate, Warner Bros. Discovery, Sony Pictures and Paramount — paused their ad spending on the platform.
The pullback started after he appeared to endorse an antisemitic conspiracy theory on X in a reply to another user’s post in mid-November, calling it the “absolute truth.”
Just one day later, a report from the left-leaning media watchdog Media Matters for America accused X of placing ads for mainstream brands next to pro-Nazi and white nationalist content.
As advertisers fled, Musk attempted to contain the fallout with a trip to Israel, in which he met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and toured a kibbutz that was attacked by Hamas militants on Oct. 7.
However, upon returning to the U.S., Musk lashed out at major advertisers who had stopped spending on the platform.
“If someone is going to try and blackmail me with advertising, blackmail me with money, go f— yourself,” he said at The New York Times DealBook Summit. “Go f— yourself. Is that clear? Hope it is.”
“Hey Bob, if you’re in the audience,” Musk added, in an apparent response to Disney CEO Bob Iger, who earlier in the summit addressed his company’s decision to halt spending on X.
After Musk’s outburst, Lou Paskalis, the CEO and founder of the marketing consultancy AJL Advisory, said he thinks “the era of advertising is well and truly dead at Twitter.“
“Either out of hubris or a plan that I don’t understand, an end game I really don’t understand, he wanted to put the sword in the beast and say, ‘I don’t care about advertisers. Their concerns don’t concern me. I don’t need you to succeed,’” Paskalis told The Hill.
Even more so than telling advertisers to “go f‑‑‑ yourself,” Paskalis said that Musk’s decision to publicly call out Iger has companies concerned.
“That is the more concerning thing for corporate America, that he would go so far to call out the CEO of somebody who’s stopped advertising,” he said.
“That freezes large companies,” Paskalis added. “It paralyzes them because they never want to put their CEO in any kind of thing that would get them caught up in the middle of the culture war.”
Read more in a full report at TheHill.com.
