If you can't woo 'em, sue 'em
Elon Musk ran off advertisers; now he's suing them for leaving
Fire content moderators, bring back banned users, allow disinformation and hate speech to flow freely, spew your own venom as you please, tell fleeing advertisers to get lost, and then sue them when they do.
This is Elon Musk’s business plan at the social media platform he acquired in 2022 and sullied with the letter X.
On Tuesday, X filed a lawsuit against some of its former top advertisers alleging they orchestrated a boycott that cost the company billions of dollars and ran afoul of anti-trust laws.
The lawsuit follows Musk’s half-hearted attempt at the Cannes Lions festival in June to woo back advertisers and soften the blow of the “go-fuck-yourself” line he threw at them during a Nov. 29 Dealbook Summit.
It didn’t work. (As I opined in a June 20 Business Blunders post: “It’s not all that easy to go un-fuck yourself.” ) So now the genius of our time is declaring war on his former customers.
“We tried peace for 2 years, now it is war,” Musk declared on X Tuesday. He’s also encouraging other platforms to file lawsuits against companies that won’t pony up advertising dollars.
Musk is leveraging the judicial power of the state to force unhappy advertisers to spend money on X. Does that sound like free-market capitalism?
X is Musk’s $44 billion blunder
If Musk’s latest move smacks of unbridled anger and hopeless desperation, it could be because he paid $44 billion for Twitter in October 2022 and drove down its value to as little as $12.5 billion, by some estimates.
He can afford it. But shares of his electric carmaker Tesla are down more than 20% this year, and some observers blame a decline in auto sales on his ongoing antics.
“I’ll say what I want, and if the consequence of that is losing money, so be it,” Musk said in a CNBC interview in May 2023.
So be it.
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