Billionaire Elon Musk’s social media platform X has sued a group of advertisers, alleging that a “massive advertiser boycott” deprived the social media titan of billions of dollars in revenue and violated antitrust laws.
X, 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.
In the lawsuit, X accused the advertising group’s brand safety initiative, called the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, of helping to coordinate a pause in advertising after Musk bought Twitter for USD 44 billion 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”.
X CEO Linda Yaccarino said in a video announcement that the lawsuit stemmed in part from evidence uncovered by the US House Judiciary Committee which she said showed a “group of companies organized a systematic illegal boycott” against X.
The lawsuit’s allegations center 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 hate speech.
Musk said those fleeing advertisers were engaging in “blackmail”.