Jakub Borzycki | Noor Photo | Getty Images
Elon Musk's social media platform X has filed a lawsuit against a group of advertisers, alleging that a “massive advertiser boycott” has deprived the company of billions of dollars in revenue and violated antitrust laws.
The company formerly known as Twitter filed a lawsuit Tuesday in federal court in Texas against the World Federation of Advertisers and member companies Unilever, Mars, CVS Health and Orsted.
The ad group, called the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, was accused of helping orchestrate a pause in advertising after Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion in late 2022 and overhauled its staff and policies.
Musk posted a comment on the lawsuit on X on Tuesday, saying “now the war begins” 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 U.S. House Judiciary Committee, which she said showed “a group of companies orchestrated a systematic illegal boycott” of X.
Last month, the Republican-led committee held a hearing to consider whether existing laws are “sufficient to deter anticompetitive collusion in online advertising.”
The lawsuit's allegations focus on the early days of Musk's Twitter takeover, 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 that their ads were appearing next to pro-Nazi content and hate speech on the site in general, with Musk fueling tensions with his own posts endorsing anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.
Musk later said the fleeing advertisers were engaged in “blackmail,” used vulgar language, and were told to leave.
The World Federation of Advertisers and representatives for CVS, Orsted, Mars and Unilever, based in Belgium, did not immediately respond to requests for comment Tuesday.
