Elon Musk Reacts On Advertiser’s Boycott On X: Calls It A Blackmail He Won’t Accept

What it’s going to do is it’s going to kill the company, and the whole world will know the advertisers killed the company,” Musk said at the New York Times DealBook conference on Wednesday. “Go f—- yourself.

These are the words of Elon Musk, and he made this comment on advertisers boycotting the platform for his anti-semitic posts and circulation of divisive content. He apologized for his anti-semitic post and comment but refused to accept this behavior on the advertisers’ part.

He accepted that it was the dumbest post from him so far. However, if advertisers want to blackmail the platform by stopping advertisements and stripping it of money, he is unwilling to play to their tunes.

Since Musk’s takeover, the platform has not been doing well in terms of advertising revenues. Back in July, he announced that the ad revenue of the platform was down by around 50%. In 2022, Twitter earned a whopping $3.96 billion from advertisements. However, it got down to $2 billion in 2023 after Musk’s takeover of the platform.

The ad revenue of the platform further went down in October 2023. It was 60% less in a year-on-year comparison. Again, in early November, there were reports of ads on X being posted next to offensive content. This practice of X made the advertisers furious, and situations became worse with Musk’s anti-semitic post. As a result, big names like NBCUniversal, Apple, and Disney paused their ad support for the platform.

He apologized by saying, “I mean, look, I’m sorry for that post. It was foolish of me. Of the 30,000 it might be literally the worst and dumbest post I’ve ever done. And I’ve tried my best to clarify six ways from Sunday, but you know at least I think it’ll be obvious that in fact far from being antisemitic, I’m in fact philosemitic.”

Nevertheless, Musk’s approach to the pause of advertisements on the platform cannot be called intelligent because its survival heavily relies on ad revenues.