Elon Musk pushed back on advertisers boycotting X over antisemitism and other hate speech on the platform formerly known as Twitter during the 2023 DealBook Summit in New York on Wednesday.
What he’s saying: “If somebody’s gonna try to blackmail me with advertising? Blackmail me with money? Go f**k yourself.” Musk said. “Don’t advertise.”
That’ll get em back.
He knows they will be back. They’re only pausing buys.
Big companies all claimed they wouldn’t donate to J6 insurrectionists… that lasted about three months before the bribes started again.
It’s actually been more than just pausing ads. There was a news story yesterday that a number of the big names have stopped using Twitter entirely since pausing too.
Twitter needs ad money, but it also needs these companies. If they stop using it to contact customers and make announcements, the appeal of Twitter falls heavily.
We’ll see how long it lasts.
I believed the corporations when they said they’d cut off Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz. Nope, all bullshit.
Does it need those companies? I don’t think anyone ever used Twitter because it’s where they could receive little ads from Apple and Disney. The interesting people on Twitter are just people, not faceless PR flacks for massive brands.
Above all else, Twitter (and all social media, including Lemmy) needs engagement. By extension, it needs users and posts/comments. Without these, any social network withers and dies. Twitter also needs to sell ads to make a profit, but those only work when there’s engagement.
Corporate Twitter accounts have their place, but it’s usually only a small piece of the puzzle.
The reports of their shrinking user base and posts are far more indicative of their downfall. While they don’t paint a rosy picture, they also don’t show quite the same level of implosion.
LMAO! Not buying your shitty product isn’t blackmail, drama queen.
Or am I blackmailing McDonald’s by not eating their burgers?
I have been boycotting Rolls Royce and Lear Jets for years and I thought I was just poor.
I’m blackmailing the meat industry
And I’m boycotting the tofu industry. Together we can end all foods!
fistbump
I actually also rarely eat tofu (mom was a health nut who couldn’t cook well and my wife has a low grade soy intolerance). It’s all beans. Mostly black beans because they’re wonderful. Also lentils, miracle food those lentils are.
I’ll blackmail ur meat industry bb
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Quit blackmailing me by not buying my pristine pubes.
Sorry, but I only buy used.
They depreciate right when you take them off the lot, so why waste the money?
Just as with Donald Trump or America’s other high profile narcissistic capitalists, Musk’s shadow over society is entirely driven by the attention he is given. They DO NOT CARE what kind of attention it is. Clearly.
Stop following Xitter links. Stop regurgitating his idiotic vitriol of the day. Stop giving him oxygen.
Report on what his companies do or fail to do, report his business failures on objective terms. if you haven’t realized by now, the nonsense he says is nothing but self-hype or in this case shock/outrage bait.
With one notable exception: report, inform and spread news about Swedish metalworker union strike against Tesla.
Just as with Trump when he was in office, the right thing to do is report on actions, not their baiting words.
Your example falls under that. How is his company actually parcipating, not participating, undermining, etc union negotiations? Thats legit. Hypothetically reporting on Elon xeeting “fuck unions herp derp im edgy!” during said negotiations is a bad idea on the other hand.
While I agree with the sentiment, he’s only in deep shit right now because people talked about his antisemitic remarks. I think it’s good to continue reporting on his idiotic vitriol as much as possible, because it’s actively hurting him.
This. And also it makes the markets think twice about providing capital to this psychopath for future endeavors.
Because he’s such a breathtaking narcissist, he’s the front face of his companies, and that face is decaying in real time and the markets are reacting BECAUSE it’s in zeitgeist to talk about it
What remarks did he make that were “antisemitic”?
Brilliant move from Elon. By telling his advertisers to get fucked he shows he is bad ass and being bad ass is smart.
Too bad badassery… doesn’t pay the bills, eh?
Can I have a hotdog and a coke? That will be 2 badasses please.
He can always switch to less-savory advertisers.
This isn’t about keeping the lights on (paying the bills), it’s about maximizing profit. As always.
True, he cannot make as much profit with Oni-hole ads than Coca-cola ads, but it won’t matter as far as keeping twitter operational is concerned.
Twitter wasn’t profitable before he bought it. Loosing ad revenue makes it even less profitable; he’s actively losing money and, to be perfectly blunt, hurts him far more than any insult I could conceive.
Sure, but don’t let that stop you from insulting him. The activity is its own reward.
“I have no problem being hated,” Musk said, emphasizing that the trip was planned before his controversial post on X.
Grimes still doesn’t want you back, dude.
“What this advertising boycott is going to do [is] to kill [X]. The whole world will know that those advertisers killed the company and we will document it in great detail.”
Spoken exactly like the person who doesn’t care if they’re hated or not. “I WILL DOCUMENT YOUR TRANSGRESSIONS IN GREAT DETAIL!!”
“What this advertising boycott is going to do [is] to kill [X]. The whole world will know that those advertisers killed the company and we will document it in great detail.”
I, too, prefer making other people the scapegoat to avoid letting myself feel any personal responsibility over my actions.
It’s like a rapist who ends up in jail and blames the victim with the rationale that “she was asking for it”.
He wants Twitter dead, he never wanted the company and he’s stuck with it and is basically doing the most above board sabotage of the company he can get away with.
…funded by Saudis, who also want Twitter dead so it can’t be used to organize Arab Spring 2.0.
I don’t really follow this. If he actually doesn’t want Twitter to be a thing, there’s a button in the data center that turns off all the servers. He can just push that. There’s no law against it and he’s the majority shareholder - what’s he going to do, sue himself?
To advance his political agenda, it needs to look like an accident. Or incompetence.
I’m not convinced that’s what he’s actually doing, but I do acknowledge that it’s a pretty strong case. But as the old adage goes, never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by stupidity.
Yeah I have my doubts that it’s a purposeful plan. He’d have to know people would see him as a laughingstock, and his ego couldn’t handle that.
“I WILL WATCH THAT DOCUMENTARY AND LAUGH EVERY TIME I SEE YOU GETTING SADDER AND SADDER AT YOUR FAILING BUSINESS WHICH IS ENTIRELY YOUR FAULT MR MUSK, YOU SMELLY CARROT OF A MAN”
Is how I’d respond to that.
Wasn’t he recently visiting israeli kibuts settlers and learning about the hamas attack just after the wave of press about antisemitism on X? He’s fragile.
What this advertising boycott is going to do [is] to kill [X]
Sounds fucking good to me. Keep it up, non-advertisers.
and I will buy the crap out of those products that were the downfall of
TwitterX
Man haven’t seen this one in a MINUTE. Good choice my dude.
From the NYT reporting
Although Mr. Musk acknowledged that an extended boycott could bankrupt X, he suggested that the public would blame the brands rather than him for its collapse.
lol, yeah, sure.
The word he’s looking for is “thank.” As in I’d like to thank the brands not advertising on Twitter. Not just the ones that withdrew their current ad campaigns, but also and especially the brands that never advertised there. I’m glad he’s documenting them because I can’t be arsed to keep a list.
Lol. Lmao even
This statement is the strongest evidence I’ve seen so far that he actually doesn’t know what he’s doing. Anyone who was self-aware, anyone who didn’t live in a double-hulled iron-clad bubble would certainly know that we are out here laughing at and blaming him. Not the brands.
If this isn’t a sincere proof of his ignorance, then who is this statement even for? The brands don’t believe this, and wouldn’t care if they did. The public no longer has any horse in this race. He’s talking to himself with this statement, and that’s why it’s clear that he truly has no idea what he’s doing.
That’s… kinda pathetic, actually. He’s acting like a literal child. “I didn’t want the cookie anyways!”
I would laugh at the absurdity if he wasn’t in charge of a major communications network.
It’s kind of inspiring, really. A guy with the mental age of myself when I was a teenage edge-overlord can “effectively” run a massive social media website. I really can do anything! I mean, I could if I had an emeralds mine from my papa, but still!
Oh, but he does want it. At the same time he’s whining about how they’ll “kill X” and threatening to document it and tell the world what a victim he is.
That’s the sort of thing I’ve been saying for years back when he first became involved with Tesla and SpaceX and everybody was fellating him for being such a “visionary” or whatever. I’d point out that what he was doing was nothing more than what any 12-year-old nerdy kid with a Popular Science subscription and a billion dollars would do, and would get downvoted to Hell for it.
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Nah man, it’s someone else is fed a rotten hot dog, tells their friends, and their friends say, you know what, I don’t need a rotten hotdog in my life
Edit: and Elon is claiming he never served a rotten hot dog so it’s blackmail. But he did serve a rotten hotdog. A fetid, gross, rotten hotdog.
Someone should run an ad for mastodon there.
Maybe not… If people still hang out there, we might not want them.
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tfw you no longer need adblock on twitter because no one will advertise there
elons a genius /s
I live in Ireland and for a very long time, I received so few ads I could simply block them away or tolerate them. Then one day, for no apparent reason, my feed was lousy with ads. Not relevant ads, or even generalised ads that anyone in Ireland might see - no, they were Chinese regional development ads, ads in Turkish, ads for various NGOs in Africa. It was absolute meaningless dreck. Were Twitter putting these in my feed as a bug, or to boost impressions of this junk to skim some pennies? I have no idea.
But I uninstalled the app. When I use twitter I launch it through Firefox mobile and uBlock origin and all the ads are stripped out. I don’t know if the feed issue I suffered was fixed or is still there. I don’t care any more. The way I look at it is, is Twitter is the predominant social media out there but there are many others. I’ll leech off the service and if Elon burns his platform to the ground, then there is always somewhere else. He makes out that the world will rise up against advertisers but the reality is Threads or Bluesky will takeover and that will be that.
Just stop using it
Make a Mastodon account, and migrate your X account to Mastodon. Apparently you can set them up to sync with each other, but I’m not sure how, as I never had a Twitter.
“What this advertising boycott is going to do [is] to kill [X]. The whole world will know that those advertisers killed the company and we will document it in great detail.”
The whole world has been watching Musk single-handedly tank the company since he acquired it.
Godspeed, boycotters. Godspeed.
It’s like watching a dude punch himself in the dick, over and over. Eventually you stop laughing and watch in horrified fascination to see how much he can take before he keels over.
I’m rooting for him. I think he can take a lot more dick punches. Keep it up, Elon. You can win! Or whatever the fuck he’s trying to do.
That’s basically where I am with Musk, honestly.
I’m not quite there yet, still amusing as hell.
“Those grapes look sour anyway.”
- Elon
Just follow his directions: don’t advertise.
Also don’t visit. Why would you?
Artists and porn artists.
Bluesky hasn’t got enough of them yet, mastodon apps aren’t quite on that level yet.
Also overseas users. Lots of Japanese developers are sticking with it for now, until they have to go back to mixi or some shit.
I don’t. Though I do follow a couple feeds for important things like the local NWS office. As soon as they post regularly elsewhere that can include notifications of new posts, I’ll happily drop them and Xitter.
This is the thing keeping the Xitter paper-bag-of-poop from being set on fire - a clear, easy, how-to for municipal and government agencies to get on mastodon and cross-post for a temporary period.
Somebody make one please
