Elon Musk declares "war" on a bunch of advertisers

Serious question: can you sue someone for not wanting to do business with you? That appears to be what Elon Musk and his company X (formerly Twitter) are attempting. Like many of Musk’s endeavors, it sounds monumentally stupid to us. But if a big company takes the time to file a major lawsuit against several other big companies, there must be legitimate grounds for the suit, right? Right…?

X is suing the World Federation of Advertisers, including member companies Unilever, Mars, CVS Health, and Orsted for what X is calling an “illegal boycott” of the platform in 2022. (That’s right after Musk took over, fired a bunch of people, and changed Twitter policies, not the time in 2023 when he scared a bunch of advertisers off by boosting antisemitic conspiracies.) X filed its lawsuit after the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee found the WFA’s initiative, the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, “directly organized boycotts and used other indirect tactics to target disfavored platforms, content creators, and news organizations in an effort to demonetize and, in effect, limit certain choices for consumers.” The committee (chaired by freakin’ Jim Jordan, just to give you a sense of the situation) alleged that GARM sought “to control online speech” through its actions. 

Now, one might reasonably expect that those advertisers in an alliance for “responsible media” were and are acting in their own self-interest, because advertising on Musk’s social media platform is in fact a brand risk (what a surprise, Unilever doesn’t want its posts next to porn and Nazis). You might look at this situation and think, well, that’s the free market at work. But X, empowered by the House Judiciary’s findings, has filed an antitrust suit against the WFA apparently on the grounds that its actions were an attack on free speech and cost X “billions” of dollars. “The consequence—perhaps the intent—of this boycott was to seek to deprive X’s users… of the Global Town Square,” X CEO Linda Yaccarino said in a statement. Musk has long advocated that X is a platform for “free speech,” though of course in practice this seems more often to mean speech that Musk personally agrees with. Perhaps even more ludicrously, Yaccarino described X as “the one that place you can express yourself freely and openly” in a video released about the suit. If X is really the last bastion for free expression, then man, we are toast. 

Musk has been posting through it, as is his wont, writing on his own page, “I strongly encourage any company who has been systematically boycotted by advertisers to file a lawsuit. There may also be criminal liability via the RICO Act.” He added, “We tried being nice for 2 years and got nothing but empty words. Now, it is war.” Setting aside that Musk said “Fuck advertisers” on stage last year, declaring war on the people whose money you want seems like a bad strategy. But maybe we’re just having a hard time keeping up with Elon’s big ol’ galaxy brain.