Elon Musk has told advertisers who are considering pulling their spend from X to “Go fuck yourselves” in an on-stage interview.
It’s a pretty frank statement for the company’s owner and chief technology officer which, until recently, received 90 per cent of its revenue from advertising partners.
Musk was chatting to journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin of DealBook — a publication from the New York Times that reports on mergers, acquisitions, venture capital and hedge funds — Musk said he would not be “blackmailed” by advertisers who might pull their spend from X following his widely reported touting of antisemitic conspiracy theories on X. Here’s how the chat went:
MUSK: “I hope they stop.”
SORKIN: “You what?”
MUSK: “Don’t advertise.”
SORKIN: “You don’t want them to advertise?”
MUSK: “If somebody’s going to try to blackmail me with advertising, blackmail me with money, go fuck yourself.”
SORKIN: “But—”
MUSK: “Go…fuck…yourself.”
Musk even singled out Disney CEO Bob Iger, which pulled its spend on X recently, with Musk waving and saying “Hi Bob”.
“This advertising boycott is going to kill the company… and the whole world will know that those advertisers killed the company and we will document it in great detail”, said Musk.
“Those advertisers, I imagine, are going to say ‘We didn’t kill the company'”, replied Sorkin.
“Oh yeah? Tell it to Earth”, said Musk.
Sorkin even put it to Musk that he could keep X going for a while given his vast personal fortune if advertising revenue completely dried up. Musk simply said that if the company fails because of an advertiser boycott, “Earth will know it”.
The problem for Musk is whether anyone on Earth would care. Data from SimilarWeb showed that global web traffic to Twitter was down 14 per cent in September.
There was more, however. During the 90-minute chat, Sorkin said “There are people who are demonstrably antisemitic on the site. I get ‘Jew boy’ things and all sorts of things that come my way” to which Musk replied “Sure”.
Musk even saw fit to add “For a while they thought I was Jewish so I’d get it too”.
The whole saga was quite embarrassing to say the least. It also makes one wonder what Linda Yaccarino, the former NBCUniversal ad exec parachuted into X by Musk in a bid to rescue its flagging ad sales, thinks about the whole affair.
You can watch the whole affair here:
