Flipping the Bird

Musk told advertisers to "go fuck themselves." Now he's suing them for not advertising

Image: Badly edited by author

The slow yet steady downfall of Twitter X has been nothing if not entertaining. I'll also admit it's been sad; as a long-time user of the platform, experiencing its death spiral has been a bit shit. I miss the old times. I recently deleted all my content, and barring a few lists I use for sports news, I've abandoned ship.

It has been a death by a thousand cuts as the platform continues to descend into irrelevance (or relevance, but for all the wrong reasons?) And this week, things got taken to a whole new level. 

The platform — owned by a CEO who told the main source of revenue to "go fuck themselves" — is suing those advertisers for choosing not to advertise on a site that's become a cesspit of hate, vitriol, nazis, porn and bots, championed by a 15-year old child who cares about nothing but his personal wealth and stroking his ego.

Well, they are actually suing them for collaborating in this boycott, for forming a cartel if you will, claiming that this is anti-competitive and harmful to the platform's survival. 

You can watch the video below, which, I have to warn you, is cringe-inducing. So much so, it could be a deepfake. The strange hand gestures, the "Mama Free Speech" necklace, the robotic delivery—someone put her in contact with Zuckerberg's PR team. Or perhaps she was held at gunpoint here. LINDA, BLINK TWICE IF YOU NEED HELP. 

At the crux of this, though, is something very important — Elon Musk got what he wanted. 

If you need reminding, let's go back to a DealBook conference late last year. Musk began with the usual nervous laughter and self-deprecating jokes about himself and his companies. But then, either the Ketamine kicked in, or Musk had one sip too many of the Twitter Blue Koolaid, causing him to forget he is the CEO of a multibillion-dollar social media platform. 

When asked by host Andrew Ross Sorkin about recent antisemitic posts on X and whether his company can survive the advertiser boycott — something that is completely justified when your content is appearing next to gutter-level content — he went turbo;

"I hope they stop. Don't advertise. If somebody is going to try to blackmail me with advertising, blackmail me with money, go fuck yourself. Go fuck yourself. Is that clear? I hope it is."

It was absolute, pure and utter cringe, nothing short of embarrassing. The edge lord was throwing his toys out the pram because advertisers didn't want to be associated with anti-semitism and a platform that's descending into an alt-right white male fan club.

When Sorkin asked how the business would be affected if advertisers didn't return, he stated,

"It's going to kill the company. The whole world will know that those advertisers killed the company, and we'll document it in great detail. That is what everybody on Earth will know. We'll be gone, and it'll be gone because of an advertiser boycott."

That line is important. Great leaders can admit and accept blame and responsibility and take the necessary steps to adjust course and fix the issues. In Musk's case, he'd rather ride the coattails of the ideology surrounding him, buy into the self-infatuated belief that he can do whatever he wants, and look to push the blame onto anyone but himself.

Let's face it — telling your customers to go fuck themselves (let's not forget, advertisers are the customers, and our eyeballs are the product) is an insane move. A complete advertiser exodus would kill the platform, yet there he was, baiting it to happen. It's unhinged and shows the facade he has created of being some all-knowing entrepreneurial god cracked a long time ago. 

Like many level-headed minds, I've long wracked my brain for some reasoning for all this. The simplest explanation I've come up with is that it gives Musk his out. He didn't want to buy Twitter, he certainly doesn't want to own it, and he's never had a plan for the platform, working off whims and moments of "inspiration" while he scrolls his 'For You' feed at 3 am on the toilet. His various plans to improve the platform and transform it into the "public town square" have all failed to make a significant impact; the awful rebrand, the Blue memberships and checkmark drama, moving to video-first, opening up the character count, forcing people to pay for APIs, trying to juice replies and engagement (and his own posts), his battle against the bots that has led to even more bots, encouraging NSFW content, the awful Grok AI, the plans to become the "everything app" which will essentially be the nothing app. Almost every decision has chipped away at the very fabric of what made the platform special. It’s a shadow of its former glory. But that won't be why it fails, at least not in Musk's mind. When it all comes crashing down, he wants to be in a position to say, "it was the advertisers," and not, "Oh, I made a total fucking mess of the whole thing." 

The unfortunate truth is that social media depends on advertising.

Yes, it's shit that so many of the platforms are beholden to it. I'd love to see us break away from that strangleholdm, but that won’t be anytime soon. This era of social media is in too deep. Advertising revenues makes up huge percentages — or almost all — of these companies' income, and that means you can't recklessly tear them down publicly or dismiss their reasons and concerns for not wanting to advertise, and it certainly makes even less sense to sue them for exercising that right— what message does that send to future advertisers? 

And what could possibly be achieved by this? Linda Yaccarino might claim the "evidence and facts are on our side," but the evidence is also clear on the other side. Ads were appearing next to content that was antisemitic, racist, hateful, sexual or made by bots. You can't force advertisers to advertise. So, the only reason to pursue this is to make a point and massage egos, which is very on-brand for Musk. Unfortunately, those motivations are exactly how we got here in the first place.

The biggest problem the platform has faced is suffering from a bad dose of rudderless leadership since Daddy Musk turned up on what is now known as national 'Let That Sink In' day. 

Flipping the bird at advertisers and then declaring war on them might be the poorest showing of business acumen yet.