Advertisers Say They Do Not Plan to Return to X After Musk’s Comments
Elon Musk, the owner of X, criticized advertisers with expletives on Wednesday at The New York Times’s DealBook Summit.
Elon Musk, the owner of X, criticized advertisers with expletives on Wednesday at The New York Times’s DealBook Summit.
I loved him telling advertisers to fuck off and all the people listening just laughing at him like the moron that he is. He thinks his edgy, middle aged man schtick is cool, but everyone's laughing at how pathetic he is
What he doesn’t realise (which most middle aged men don’t realise, myself included) is how far the culture has moved since 2001. The values, the mores, the basic morality has shifted. It isn’t tight jeans past 40 that make you look old, it’s your outmoded relationship with the world that does that.
He's an entitled thrust fund baby. An overgrown 15 year old edgelord.
It's very funny that his single biggest failure is so public. Like if The Boring Company couldn't find customers, it would just quietly shut down. Newsworthy, but only for like a day.
This is monthly stories about severe incompetence and petulance.
Like if The Boring Company couldn't find customers, it would just quietly shut down.
If? Besides a few small projects have they ever scored anything significant?
Ha I didn't want to put this in my comment to complicate the point but no they've only done one actual thing so this could have happened and I don't know that we'd know.
it's public because it is the public it's twitter
There are different levels of "public". Musk doesn't need to publicly announce he's telling all the advertisers to fuck off, he could tell it to them on a private call and then the public would most likely only know what advertisers are pulling out. The whole "fuck off" statement never needed to be public, Musk made it public because he can do whatever the fuck he wants. The same goes for a lot of things you see about Twitter. He didn't need to do his things in public, he simply did.
monthly
Lol it's a bit more frequent than that.
The Boring Company is a line item expense so Tesla can keep selling cars while stalling rail projects. It was never meant to do anything.
I thought this guy was supposed to be right wing? Doesn't he like the free market? Because, I mean, the alternative is regulation. We could make antisemitism illegal, but in the west we have largely decided that we will instead rely on free market forces (read: public shaming) to root that shit out.
It's almost as if... and this might sound crazy, but hear me out... it's almost as if this guy wants the advantages of capitalism, but none of its disadvantages?
Hypocrisy? From a right winger? What's next, water being wet?
So when twitter actually dies will people finally start using mastodon then? Or they too eager to use another billionaire owned social media and migrate to threads?
I'm going to invent the perfect social media system where you type a comment and then a bunch of LLMs just argue with you forever and nobody has to read anybody else's stupid bullshit.
You forgot the most important part? You need to have notifications pop up every 15 mins so you get a dopamine hit for checking how many bots liked your devastating own of another bot in an argument.
They're already going to threads or bluesky if they're able. Honestly though? I don't think we want THAT many people flooding the fediverse. There's already a bunch of accounts here that exist only to troll or have bad takes.
Hey now! I already created my own fediverse servers in Panama and registered to a local domain provider down there and am behind 7 proxy’s at all times for my Shit Posting aS a Service or SPASS as it’s commonly called. You can’t take that away from us!
All joking aside I hope you’re wrong but it’s probably gonna go that way. Really want Mastodon to take off here
Bluesky is pretty allright but it's poorly built lol
The second one, a number of people that I follow are going to blue sky, they learned nothing.
No they won't. The federation system like it's currently implemented will never be mainstream.
You literally can’t know that and are just being unnecessarily cynical.
The crazies might stick with Truth Social 100% rather than 50/50 with Twitter
Can you think of a single open source, open community spcial platform that has gained anything more than early adopter adoption?
Mastodon has a terrible name that sounds like masturbate
There is no charismatic leader
There is no method to advertise on the platform, so the platform will suffer from no commercial incentives or correlation (e.g. find us on Twitter)
It's confusing to the vast majority of people that you can join from more than one location
There are other platforms that do the same thing, why this one?
Elon: Go fuck yourself advertisers
Advertisers: Understandable, have a nice day [doubles spend on other platforms]
I don't see how anyone expected this to end. I for one am hoping for a fatal ketamine od.
"Hours later, Linda Yaccarino, X’s chief executive, tried to mitigate the damage. In a post on X, she shifted attention to Mr. Musk’s apology for associating himself with antisemitism and appealed to advertisers to return.
“X is enabling an information independence that is uncomfortable for some people,” Ms. Yaccarino wrote. “X is standing at a unique and amazing intersection of Free Speech and Main Street — and the X community is powerful and here to welcome you.”
It's called information independence y'all, look it up. Kinda like alternative facts but better.
X is giving actual Nazis a platform, so that comment can fuck right off.
Honestly at this point it's ok. Because the worse it gets the quicker people will abandon it. Advertisers leaving means famous people won't be able to monetize the website optimally and they'll start looking for alternatives as well. It will just take the right start up with leadership that isn't a massive dick head to see sometime knock out the titan. I honestly can't wait.
Well, Linda Yaccarino is an actual Nazi, so that tracks.
A unique and amazing platform, no less.
This woman must have some clause in her contract that says she loses some big cash bonus if she quits too soon. Why would any sane person with a reputation that is quickly eroding choose to stay?
So, personal agenda/interests probably...
“The X community” can go FUCK ITSELF! Is that clear? I hope so.
Yep!
However, at this point, isn't it mostly bots?
Let Muskrat dump even more money into that dumpster.
Please buy Facebook next!!!
He doesn't need to, just sharing his drugs with Zucc should do it.
“X is enabling an information independence that is uncomfortable for some people,” Ms. Yaccarino wrote. “X is standing at a unique and amazing intersection of Free Speech and Main Street — and the X community is powerful and here to welcome you.”
Wow, the mental gymnastics. Someone call the Olympic committee.
it’s incredible to see the lengths they will go to, all of the new phrases and euphemisms they’re willing to conjure up, before admitting they’re doings things badly and everything is on fire
uncomfortable for some people People like me, who got tired of the firehose of ultra-right-wing lies, conspiracy theories, and propaganda. Oh, and nazis.
He's trying to find a scapegoat to blame for destroying the company, and he seems to think he's found it in the advertisers that are withdrawing their money.
Benny “Dry Humping Only” Shapiro is calling it an attempt to silence Musk and an attack on free speech
These guys never showed up for fifth grade civics
I think they have, they just know their base is easy to manipulate.
You can always count on Benny to come up with some hot take that's wrong, stupid, or not even wrong.
Hard to deny this as he explicitly said it in this same interview, but the fan boys will
Don't forget his "lawsuit" against Media Matters.
I heard David Samson (former president of the Miami Marlins) suggest that he wants the advertisers to all bail so that he can entice his sycophants to boycott the companies who pulled their ad revenue.
He suggested that if you have the type of f-you money to waste that Musk does, then it's simply an ego move. He's not going to succeed with XTwitter so he might as well let it burn, and scorch as many people as he can in the hopes of getting petty revenge on those who crossed him.
Finally. Took them long enough.
And all it took was him telling them to go fuck themselves.
Not sure who's dumber, Elon or the advertisers.
Letting Nazis stay on the platform? Not enough.
Unbanning Kanye? Not enough.
Elon personally agreeing that Jews were going to destroy white people? Not enough.
Telling them to go fuck themselves? HOW DARE HE?!?!
This.
There are so many media institutions and slebs who have and still are giving twitter all its content .
They are complicit in this.
The most hilarious thing about the whole thing to me was the way he said, "blackmail me with money?" as if he's definitely automatically wealthy to a level that he doesn't have to worry about being bullied.
Leave aside the whole framing where the only reason people might be pulling out is to blackmail Elon Musk personally, and just assume that that's true and analyze the question of whether he's big enough to be immune if they decide that's what they want to do. Musk is worth somewhere around $100-200 billion personally. I picked, totally at random, a single one of the advertisers who have pulled out, and learned that Eli Lilly has a market cap of around $565 billion. Remember this? Back from a year ago?
Eli Lilly and Co. stopped showing ads on Twitter the day after an account impersonating the pharmaceutical company — complete with a purchased blue check mark — posted, "We are excited to announce insulin is free now."
Eli Lilly asked Twitter to take it down, but the tweet remained up for hours, because the platform's staff was stretched thin due to recent layoffs and resignations. The tweet garnered hundreds of retweets and thousands of likes, and Eli Lilly's stock soon took a dive.
as if he’s definitely automatically wealthy to a level that he doesn’t have to worry about being bullied.
"One of the indulgences of great wealth is freedom from other peoples' opinions." Trump and Musk both seem to have missed this memo. They're so self-absorbed and insulated that they can't imagine there are people out there that they can't buy, can't bribe, and can't silence. Their lives must be so empty they can only hear the echoes of their critics... or maybe that's just my imagination.
Maybe a little bit your imagination but I think I get your point. Would anyone here concern themselves with this nonsense given Elon Musks means? I doubt it.
Huh. I wonder why Saudi Arabia isn't demanding their $22B back.
Because they didn't do it as an investment. Destroying the platform was the point.
Legitimately curious because I'm OOTL: why would Saudi Arabia want to destroy Twitter? My (admittedly uninformed) instinct says it would be a waste of their large investment and control over a platform ripe with potential for them to control narratives over their shitty PR for human rights abuses and other shit. Would it just be to prevent negative coverage of their actions from spreading?
Again, not arguing, just legitimately curious. I figured Twitter's downfall would be really bad for them since they have sway over Musk and a vested interest in the platform.
Exactly what I was implying. If destroying the platform wasn't the point, then they'd want to know why they're not seeing a return on their investment. The public story is that it was an investment.
I suspect it's doing exactly what they want it to do. The platform isn't destroyed, only it's ability to make money through conventional advertising. It's still full of strongly conservative viewers running businesses with plenty of cash. It's primed to be a disinformation delivery system.
Right now if he was able to liquidate holdings, he could pay them back in full and still be #2 richest and still be above Bezos by 43 billion
They'll get some of it back when they sell his kidneys
Musk: "F*ck off and don't advertise." Advertisers:
Good news, Elon! Now you can openly let your bigot flag fly and don't even have to pretend to not mean it!
He bought this company. Why doesn't he sell it? He's clearly not running it well, and he regretted buying it in the first place. Let's start a petition to encourage Musk to let it go.
As far as I was aware, he is technically over leveraged as he used telsa stock loan to buy it. He is probably facing a really tough condondrum rn.
He isn't over leveraged, he sold stock to do it and there's a billion dollar loan or something like that.
I don't know if he's on the hook for the loan or if it's entirely twitters.
If he's on the hook he can deal with a billion no problem.
Why do you want to save xitter?
It once had the potential to be a net good. Widespread and rapid dissemination of information in an easily digestible format is a positive thing, in theory.
It stokes his ego. People have to listen to him and he can promote his own voice far beyond what it's worth.
Why do you think he regrets buying Twitter? He thinks he's saving the world from leftist propaganda. He will never be poor. It would hurt to lose 40B, but not that much. Only his ego would feel it.
An apple crate would allow him to promote his own voice far beyond what it's worth.
Right now it would only sell at a massive loss, and there's no going back from that black mark. Xitter is the hill he's going to die on. We can only hope that happens sooner than later.
Everything Disney owns needs to leave, including ABC and ESPN. Otherwise it's all bullshit theater from them.
Didn't he say he would crush twitter to stop that kid that was tracking his plane ?
or did i make that up ?
that kid that was tracking his plane
that account does not appear to be very active, probably because ... omg keeping these going must be a full time job https://grndcntrl.net/links/
He doesn’t seem well. He sounds like someone that desperately needs help. Even though I think he is a giant piece of shit, I hope he has someone around him that can get him some help. Perhaps selling Twitter or just shutting it down could be part of the solution. If nothing is done, I’m afraid this guy will end up as a case of drug overdose or suicide.
Nah man, this is the closest he will ever get for punishment for the horrible things he has done to his employees, to the actual green movement and climate change, and public discourse via Twitter.
He shouldn't even have government contracts because he readily admits he abuses drugs. But I guess rules are just for plebes like us, right?
No, fuck him, let him spiral, and I hope he fucking loses it all and kills himself.
Fucking worthless. Up there with fucking Kissinger. Both can rot in fucking hell, for all I care.
You can only feel sorry for a person up to a point. After Elon tried to defame a scubadiver by labeling him as pedophile, which included trying to get an article written on this guy and hiring a personal investigator. This was far before he started "spiraling", the man has always been unhinged and spiteful. If he loses it then it's just retribution for the people he's hurt.
I endorse this message
I think he's caught whatever Kanye's got. Probably from the same nozzle.
He’s lost in the K-hole. Jogan prob. said to him, “hey bro just try ketamine it’ll totally fix your depression bro” and hooked him up with some old burned out raver-turned-qnatic, so now the Boer is doing way more than what’s considered therapeutic
Let's hope so. The world would literally be better off for it.
That's the thing: he doesn't. He blew off Grimes, he's used every person he's married. He's a highly neurodivergent narcissist, and now he's probably hooked on special k, which means he's outright detached from reality. Furthermore, he doesn't know the phrase "I need help" and his board is his brother and a bunch of yes men. We're in for a five alarm dumpster fire that sadly will touch a lot of people before it ends.
FAFO man of the year
I think he'd rather be a victim than have advertisers. This smells weirdly calculated. Don't forget the whole anti-semite thing, which stayed up for just long enough to make it look like he had to take it down from some kind of mysterious "pressure", when we all know full well this dude dngaf. Like, none at all.
He doesn't need advertiser money. He can keep twitter afloat with the cash in his checking account. He'll just whine about it a lot.
None of this really bothers him. He wants loyal followers, and this is acquiring more of that. Maybe we'll get lucky, and it's to take them all to Mars. Cross your fingers everyone.
Maybe we’ll get lucky, and it’s to take them all to Mars.
No way, kids will be born there.
Imagine being born in a shitty space station where fucking Elon Musk decides how much water, food, and even air costs.
Especially considering he'd never go himself. You'd be an abject concept, nothing more than a number on a spreadsheet.
No one should be born into that shit.
I think his behavior shows that he has another revenue stream that is non public and foreign.
Doge
oh boy - his followers aren't going to mars, his kind are. and when they do...it will be because they don't need us anymore. they'll leave us to their steaming shit-pile of rubble the rest of us called earth
They'll think they don't need us anymore, until they have to sanitize their own telephones.
Living on mars is a shitshow. There are so many problems that even drastic wealth won't solve.
Hes welcome to it.
You think Mars is gonna be pretty nice, huh?
I doubt the billionaires themselves would personally go move to mars, or if they did, they'd only be doing so out of foolishness without realizing what they were signing up for, and I say this as someone who views space colonization as a vitally important goal for the future. The fact is that mars is not a habitable planet like earth is, it's missing a number of different parameters, and terraforming it isn't something we have anywhere near the economic capacity or technology for, and would still take centuries to millenia to complete if we started.
That doesn't mean we can't colonize it, we don't quite have all the technology there but I would bet we aren't that far from developing it, and we almost certainly could make a base to at least expand into a proper colony as we developed the needed tech for self sufficiency, it just would be prohibitively expensive with our current lack of space infrastructure and manufacturing. But it does mean that any colony we build there is going to be a small bubble of artificial habitability in an inheritly deadly environment, and is going to feel that way until the colony gets very developed and expansive enough to fit things like gardens and other amenities, which would probably be a long way off, especially considering mars would be our very first space colony or at least one of the first if we decide to go for the moon first or something.
I can imagine the best analogy on earth to a very early space colony made with near future technology would be living in a submarine, in cramped, mostly artificially lit conditions with a small number of other people , surrounded by complex and expensive machinery that needs to be constantly maintained as it's failure could rapidly lead to death. With the difference that if something goes wrong, help would take years to many months at the very best to reach you, there is no returning to "shore" without potentially years of waiting and planning, and even the gravity is different. Not the sort of life I can imagine anyone not very dedicated to the idea for one reason or another signing up for, least of all a billionaire. Living on earth would be easier even if you were living in a bunker after firing every nuclear weapon and burning every scrap of coal in the ground; at least then you'd be able to extract oxygen and water and potentially usable soil from the outside environment, and have comfortable gravity.
He can keep twitter afloat with the cash in his checking account.
Even he is not rich enough to be able to do that indefinitely.
I am not going to pay a single cent to read this news article
It's fine I got you https://archive.is/sg7E3
Is he in Scientology? He’s gone off the cliff like most of them do.
No. This is just a regular billionaire, same as all the rest.
Most billionaires at least have enough sense to keep a low profile.
There is nothing regular about what musk is doing. Most billionaires only make the news when they lay off or bust unions or something. When's the last time bezos was in the news for Twitter trolling?
No, he is just a man child who was forced into dumping billions into a social media platform because he sucks at trolling.
That's the funny thing; he wasn't forced into it. He could have just paid $1bn for his idiotic 420 joke (or probably much less if he'd settled out of court) and gotten away without any further damage. But instead, he took out a $13 billion loan and spent another $21bn of his own money for it. So instead of setting $1bn or less on fire, he set $34 billion on fire. Plus the additional money that his idiotic compatriots put up. This truly is the dumbest timeline.
Edit: He also ended up selling a shit load of his TSLA stock to make one of his payments to the bank, which caused tesla to tank in the market costing him untold billions as well. He is not a smart man.
No, he's on ketamine. Same basic idea though.
In case anyone else also sees a paywall: https://archive.is/9Pc44
Did anyone else get caught in a captcha loop here?
It's no extortion, it's not blackmail, it's abandonment. What took these companies so long? I'll never understand how calling out the rescue diver for going to Thailand wasn't the end of Elon.
Who could have possibly seen that shit coming?
Everything he does. It's just so stupid, it has to be purposeful. Like how he rigged the market with doge coin and bit coin, just openly making statements he knew would effect the market. I bet he bought up before saying those. And now tanking Twitter, it's already dead, we may as well stop calling it by his ridiculous moniker. But I bet he's bought up whatever he's replacing Twitter with. I wouldn't even put it past him to be in cahoots with zuck, and the feud is pretend. It's all just too obvious. It reeks of I can do whatever i want, I'm above reproach.
But it doesn't actually make sense to "Buy up whatever he's replacing Twitter with." Twitter was a globally recognized media company, integrated into the daily lives of billions of people. That is what he bought. At that point there was no need to control whatever was going to replace it, he already HAD it. You don't burn down the global megacorporation that you own just so you can replace it with some unknown startup that you also own.
He's not playing 4D Chess, he's not some genius in the guise of a fool, these aren't the actions of someone who has carefully considered their plan. Carefully considered plans don't start by burning 44 BILLION dollars.
He's an idiot, an impulsive dipshit who doesn't know when to shut the fuck up. It's why he had to buy Twitter in the first place, because like a dumbass he TALKED about buying it for meme stock prices, without disclosing he already owned a shitload of shares, so when his actions increased the share price he had to either act like he fully meant it, or be blatantly guilty of stock manipulation.
I too used to think there was some plan behind his catastrophically bad leadership of Twitter. I too thought there had to be some play, some means of making money by destroying the company, after all nobody could be THAT STUPID. But no, he really is. He really is that fucking stupid.
Please let me be clear that I abhor this dipshit, entirely. I was just pondering, you know. Even the worst people have motives, and I find trying to find sanity, in anything he does, a hard task. He must have had some end game. He must have noticed he's tanking Twitter. Continuing on and doubling down, seems purposeful. And he would want a way to rise out of the ashes ego unscathed. So I was trying to devise his exit plan. He has to have something (stupid af as it may well be) that he stands up and says 'I did this on purpose, it actually proves I'm a genius' because that's his go to response to everything. I suppose I'm trying to predict his patterns of stupid. But that's probably not possible for someone with a working brain, and or any sense of logic.
He's starting to look like Charlie's mom from always sunny
That’s a bit harsh.
He looks more like Mac’s mom. Charlie’s mom might be needy, but she doesn’t look that rough!
Now is not the time for another episode!
Mild shock :o
The question is: Who the f--k does still pay for ads in that cesspit? There should be a wall of shame for those idiots.
"We're too busy f***ing ourselves, so cannot advertise on X" - Advertisers, probably.
Well that went well....
Poor Linda Yaccarino (current CEO of Twitter). She must be wondering what in the actual ### did I get myself into...
Poor?
She's making bank having to do nothing and anything that runs X into the ground is easy to point at Musk.
She has an absolutely sweet deal.
Trump supporters generally don't ask those kind of questions of themselves. Like Trump, they like to pretend they're always endlessly self-assured in their thoughts and actions, but that couldn't be further from the truth.
People shocked that she's a fucking garbage CEO just didn't know about her past as a garbage head of a department.
I'm serious about the Trump supporting thing, too. She's a Trump supporter. The fucking stupidity and doubling down on said stupidity is required for that.
Don't feel bad for her. She knew damn well she would be leading a white nationalist platform. She's a fucking evil piece of shit.
Why would she? She has the same views as him, that's why she was selected.
But she was all excited to turn it around.
How could she not know ?
And I’m just sitting here waiting for a Bluesky invite.
Boring platform, imoho. Fedi integration isn't done, tons of high profile accounts that don't give a fuck about you, and not public.
Exactly. Also it’s like escaping a planet about to be eaten by a giant space frog only to settle on another planet in the flight path of the same space frog and then being like “wow this place is great right now”
Even if it’s boring, I want to give it a try. I already have mastodon and lemmy to keep entertained but wouldn’t mind just checking it out.
I am really curious to know what sort of ROI these companies are getting on Twitter ads. How much did they spend, say 30/60/90 days prior, and how much drop in traffic/revenue in the following 30/60/90 days. Is there any way to find this kind of data?
They aren't seeing the money they spend on Twitter back in most cases. Twitter as an ad platform is honestly terrible. There is very little targeting and even less control over what ads and content you don't want to be posted alongside. Facebook is terrible and evil and very no good bad but as someone who has used FB as an advertising platform, it is light-year beyond what you get out of Twitter. You can target your advertisements so specifically that you could effectively pin point a single user with the demographics settings alone. You want to advertise only to Russian grandmothers who live on farms in Michigan and play pickleball on the weekends? Facebook will get you there. On Twitter, you get next to no click through because the ads are annoying and irrelevant to the user. On Facebook, the clicks just come rolling in because users see things that they would have been interested in anyways.
The thing everyone is missing in these headlines is why advertisers left in the first place. They aren't leaving because there are horrible people on the platform and the CEO is a gobber with more money than sense. There are horrible people running these companies anyways. Anyone's money is good to them. No, advertisers have left because Twitter refuses to improve in any meaningful way for the users or the advertisers. Why would I spend money on Twitter when that same money will get me 10x more clickthroughs and all of them by my target demographic on Facebook?
Do you know the comparable cost of ads on these platforms? Does a Facebook ad cost 10x as much as Twitter? Just curious why advertisers would choose to use Twitter in the first place if they don't provide much value. Maybe companies just feel compelled to keep up with the Jonses, who are all putting ads there? Or is this a more recent based on how Twitter and Facebook are developing (or not) their ad platforms?
Aww. The removed don't want to hang out on my corner anymore.
!
Who cares, less ads in the world, this is good news
They will put their ads elsewhere, somewhere where actual people might see them
IMO this has less to do with Musk, or any moral consequences and more to do that most of Twitter's traffic has always been bot activity, and companies are waking up to the fact that they have been paying to serve their ads to bots.
I foresee facebook and reddit falling to the same fortune.
I can't blame them. Twitter is broken.
Does the timestamp mean they deleted their account?
No, Twitter just isn't showing posts.
Fucking yeah right. They're waiting for the moment everyone forgets about this and then they're going right back.
They werent coming back anyways.fuckem
If I was him, I will reach all the competition company that ended the relation with X and decrease the cost of ads. When sales up with company that stay everybody will forget about it. Business are business.
The platform is slowly dying , I don't think it's good for business.
There are still motherfuckers out there who think Elon is playing 3D chess and all the dumb shit he does is somehow part of some master plan. I'm guessing the morons who think the same thing about Trump probably overlap with that group quite a bit. Maybe perfectly?
Sane businesses don't want their ads appearing next to neo-Nazi content, which is what Twitter now pushes. No one will "forget about it."