Elon Musk to Sue X Advertisers After Telling Them to "F*ck Themselves"

After telling advertisers who fled X (f.k.a. Twitter) — over a tweet so abhorrent and anti-semitic that the White House condemned it — to "go fuck themselves," X CEO Elon Musk has apologized, changed the way he's posted on X, and won back all the business he's lost and then some is now attempting to sue those very same advertisers. Couldn't make it up if we tried.

Less than a year ago, in November 2023, Elon Musk was on stage at the Dealbook summit, in conversation with Dealbook founder — and perhaps America's preeminent financial journalist — Andrew Ross Sorkin, apologizing for tweeting about a racist conspiracy as "the actual truth," a tweet that caused advertisers to flee X en masse. Over the course of this apology, he called Andrew Ross Sorkin "Jonathan," gave Disney CEO Bob Iger the middle finger, and then sent advertisers who opted out of spending money a very clear message. As a reminder, the exact exchange, beginning with Sorkin referring to the offending tweet:

Since then, Elon's been on a whiplash-inducing tour de force. In June, just two months ago, after X lost record revenues from the advertiser exodus, Musk admitted that he does "shoot [himself] in the foot from time to time," and begged those same advertisers to come back. A month later, he publicly wished criminal prosecution upon them.

Now, less than a month after that, he's attempting to sue those same advertisers.  "We tried peace for 2 years, now it is war," Musk tweeted, along with an open letter from X CEO Linda Yaccarino. In the letter, titled "An open letter to advertisers," Yaccarino writes that "After a career in media and advertising, I thought I had seen everything." If you think the sentence that follows invokes the logic-defying extra-reality dimension that is having Elon Musk for a boss, try again:

So, yeah: Here comes an antitrust lawsuit from Musk and Co. over a congressional report which, we should note, comes from (A) a Republican-backed initiative led by the (Musk-blind) Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, which (B) targets the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, an initiative to create globalized advertising standards by the World Economic Forum, which (C) Musk himself oversaw X rejoining in July. That clearly didn't do the trick as far as bringing advertisers back goes, so now he's resorting to the great American tradition that is litigation. Just for good measure, he's also encouraging any company that feels "systematically boycotted" to file lawsuits alleging racketeering.

We here at Futurism Dot Com are by no means antitrust lawsuit experts, but will take the moment to casually observe that trade coalitions exist in all kinds of industries, which set best practices and standards for those industries, in the interest of those industries — this, alone, is not monopolistic behavior.

To wit, a coalition of companies creating a list of platforms whose CEOs tweet about racist conspiracies and tell those same companies to "go fuck themselves," and a list of companies whose CEOs don't tweet racist conspiracies and tell those same companies to "go fuck themselves," and suggesting that as a group, they may be better off with the latter over the former, doesn't strike us non-antitrust-suit experts here at Futurism Dot Com as violating antitrust, free speech, and racketeering statutes, but again, we didn't go to law school. Shout out to those who did, though: Lucky for you, the Elon Musks of the world — contemptuous, loaded, out of options — are gonna keep you all in business for a long, long time to come.