Elon Musk calls out Disney's Bob Iger while cursing out Twitter advertisers
"Hey Bob, if you're in the audience," Musk noted, while dropping an expletive-filled attack on Twitter's wayward advertisers
Elon Musk continues to have a very normal one tonight for roughly the thousandth night running, conducting a sit-down interview at The New York Times’ DealBook Summit earlier this evening in which he loudly, if nervously, declared “Fuck advertisers!” As noted by interview conductor Andrew Ross Sorkin, Musk made these fuck-focused comments—which he eventually said so many times that he ended up abbreviating “Go fuck yourself” to “G.F.Y.” during the conversation, as a nod to brevity—not just in front of various media luminaries in the room, but also Twitter/X CEO Linda Yaccarino, the person whose fundamentally cursed job it is to explain to advertisers why they should work with Twitter when its owner keeps treating them like opponents in an internet flame war.
If nothing else, the video of Musk’s conversation with Sorkin makes for compellingly weird TV, as he talked through his very hurt feelings at the Biden administration—he’s apparently angry Tesla didn’t get invited to an electric cars meeting back in 2021—and especially his feelings about Twitter’s ongoing ad woes, which have seen Disney, Apple, and other big advertisers pause spending over concerns about potential anti-Semitic content both on Twitter, as well as on Musk’s own timeline. (We’re guessing that Musk’s “Hey Bob, if you’re in the audience,” delivered amidst the G.F.Y.s, won’t make any serious steps toward thawing Disney CEO Bob Iger’s current reservations.) As viewers, it’s especially interesting to see Musk failing to read the room; there are certainly spaces, especially online, where that kind of fuck-bomb-ery might have brought the house down, but Musk’s routine was greeted first with silence, and then with slightly nervous laughs as he doubled down on his hostility.
Elsewhere in the conversation, Musk did address the moment online when he wrote “You’ve said the actual truth” in response to a user touting anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, calling it, “one of the dumbest of my 30,000 posts,” and attempting to explain his meaning. (He’s not anti-Semitic, he asserted; if anything, he’s “philosemitic.”) None of it, though, seems like it’s going to be any comfort to advertisers on the fence about coming back to the social media platform, especially since Musk is already throwing around accusations that they’re killing the site.