Elon Musk’s social media platform X has sued a group of advertisers, alleging that a “massive advertiser boycott” deprived the company of billions of dollars in revenue and violated antitrust laws.
The company formerly known as Twitter filed the lawsuit on Tuesday in a federal court in Texas against the World Federation of Advertisers and member companies Unilever, Mars, CVS Health and Orsted.
The lawsuit’s allegations centre on the early days of Musk’s Twitter takeover and not a more recent dispute with advertisers that came a year later.
In November 2023, about a year after Musk bought the company, a number of advertisers began fleeing X over concerns about their ads showing up next to pro-Nazi content and about hate speech on the site in general, with Musk inflaming tensions with his own posts endorsing an antisemitic conspiracy theory.
Musk later said those fleeing advertisers were engaging in “blackmail” and, using a profanity, essentially told them to go away.
The lawsuit accused the advertising group’s initiative, called the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, of helping to co-ordinate a pause in advertising after Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion US in late 2022 and overhauled its staff and policies.
Musk posted about the lawsuit on X on Tuesday, saying “now it is war” after two years of being nice and “getting nothing but empty words.”
We tried peace for 2 years, now it is war <a href=”https://t.co/elgT62uDtF”>https://t.co/elgT62uDtF</a>
—@elonmusk
Linda Yaccarino, the CEO of X Corp., said in a video announcement that the lawsuit stemmed in part from evidence uncovered by the U.S. House judiciary committee that she said showed a “group of companies organized a systematic illegal boycott” against X.
The Republican-led committee held a hearing last month examining whether current laws are “sufficient to deter anti-competitive collusion in online advertising.”
The Belgium-based World Federation of Advertisers and representatives for CVS, Orsted, Mars and Unilever didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment on Tuesday.