Apple Drops Ads on Twitter After Elon Musk’s Antisemitic Outburst

He may finally have gone too far.

Bridge Too Far

After X-formerly-Twitter owner Elon Musk co-signed blatantly antisemitic remarks, advertisers are already jumping ship.

As Axios reports, sources familiar with the situation say that Apple is pausing all its advertisements on the Musk-owned social network following a similar move from IBM as Jewish leaders and activists call for companies to withdraw their ads from the site.

Earlier this week, Musk crossed a line he'd heretofore only toed when responding to a post that accused Jewish people of "hatred against whites."

"You have said the actual truth," Musk said on the platform he owns.

It was a striking show of bigotry even for the South African-born billionaire who's pushed all manner of "white genocide" and transphobic rhetoric. In response, rabbis are warning that Musk's unsettling discourse, especially in tandem with X's increasing white supremacist problem, is fostering a dangerous atmosphere that could lead to real life antisemitic violence.

Did Nazi This Coming

As news watchdog Media Matters for America found in a new investigation, ads for companies including Apple, IBM and Amazon appeared next to all manner of white supremacist content and accounts, which along with being horrific on its face is undeniably a bad look for those corporations, especially amid the current political climate.

An X executive who spoke to Axios on condition of anonymity said that the company internally "did a sweep on the accounts that Media Matters found," demonetized them, and marked some of their posts as "sensitive content."

Although Musk's hired punching bag CEO Linda Yaccarino issued a milquetoast statement saying the social network is against "discrimination by everyone," the X owner's latest unmasked act of bigotry has, along with the advertiser exodus, earned him condemnation from the White House as well.

"It is unacceptable to repeat the hideous lie behind the most fatal act of Antisemitism in American history at any time," White House spokesperson Andrew Bates told media in a statement, referencing the massacre at the Pittsburgh Tree of Life synagogue in 2018 and its perpetrator, who posted memes accusing Jews of scheming to massacre white people en masse.

Getting in trouble for saying stupid things is all in a day's work for Musk, but this latest instance may well garner him as many consequences as the time he made a weed joke and sicced the SEC on himself — except in this case, lives could actually be at stake.

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