WICHITA FALLS, Texas, USA. —
Elon Musk’s social network X has sued a group of advertisers, alleging that a “massive advertiser boycott” deprived the company of billions of dollars in profits and violated antitrust laws.
The company, formerly known as Twitter, filed the lawsuit Tuesday in federal court in Texas against the World Federation of Advertisers and its member companies Unilever, Mars, CVS Health and Orsted.
The suit accuses the group’s initiative, called the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, of helping coordinate a pause in ad spending after Musk acquired Twitter for $44 billion in late 2022 and made changes to its staff and policies.
Musk posted about the lawsuit on X on Tuesday, saying “this is war” after two years of being a good person and “getting nothing but empty words.”
X CEO Linda Yaccarino said in a video announcement that the lawsuit stems in part from evidence uncovered by the U.S. House Judiciary Committee that she said showed “a group of companies organized a systematic and unlawful boycott” of X.
The Republican-led committee held a hearing last month to examine whether current laws are “sufficient to deter anticompetitive collusion in online advertising.”
The lawsuit’s allegations focus on the early days of Musk’s takeover of Twitter, not a more recent dispute with advertisers that arose a year later.
In November 2023, about a year after Musk acquired the company, several advertisers began fleeing X, concerned that their ads were being shown alongside pro-Nazi content and hate speech on the site at large, and Musk raised tensions with his posts supporting an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory.
The businessman later said that advertisers who left were participating in “blackmail” and, using a bad word, essentially told them to leave.
