“If somebody has been trying to blackmail me with advertising, blackmail me with money, go fuck yourself,” Musk said during an animated interview at the New York Times DealBook Summit on Wednesday.
Musk has faced criticism over the spread of disinformation and hate content on X since he bought the company formerly known as Twitter. That culminated in an advertiser exodus in recent weeks, as posts about the Israel-Hamas war spread.
Earlier this month, progressive watchdog group Media Matters published a report alleging that X had run ads for major companies next to neo-Nazi posts. In response, Musk filed a federal lawsuit accusing the group and one of its reporters of doctoring the images.
Tensions escalated when the SpaceX and Tesla owner publicly agreed with an antisemitic tweet claiming that Jewish communities have been “pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them.”
The Media Matters report and the endorsement of the antisemitic post sparked backlash from several public figures and saw many companies pull their ads from the social media site, including giants such as Apple, IBM, Disney and Coca-Cola. According to a New York Times report, this could result in a loss of up to $75 million for X.
While Musk on Wednesday apologized for the post — admitting he should not have replied to it — he didn’t mince words when talking about the fleeing advertisers.
“Go fuck yourself. Is that clear? I hope it is,” he said during the heated interview. “That’s how I feel. Don’t advertise.”
“What this advertising boycott is going to do is, it is going to kill the company,” he added. “And the whole world will know that those advertisers killed the company.”
Musk recently traveled to Israel to meet with President Isaac Herzog and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but on Wednesday denied the trip was an "apology tour."
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