Elon Musk’s social media platform X, could lose up to $75 million in advertising revenue by the end of the year after the tech billionaire seemingly backed an antisemitic conspiracy in a comment thread on the site.
The New York Times first reported that dozens of brands have opted to pause their marketing campaigns on the platform after reviewing internal documents from X.
Those documents showed that over 200 ad units from companies like Coca-Cola, Amazon, Microsoft and AirBnB have stopped or considered pausing their advertising on X.
The documents were sourced from X’s sales team, and are used to track the impact from advertisers leaving the platform throughout November. X disputed the figure, saying that up to $11 million in ad revenue was at risk, but that that number was fluid because some advertisers returned to the platform and others cranked up their spending.
Brands have hesitated to stay on the platform following Mr. Musk’s $44 billion purchase of the company last year over concerns about his behavior and lapses in content moderation, a part of Mr. Musk’s aversion to censorship.
Mr. Musk’s latest blunder came when he seemingly endorsed the antisemitic conspiracy theory that Jews support the immigration of minorities to replace white people, many of whom have turned out to be Jew-haters and Hamas supporters.
An X user wrote 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. I’m deeply disinterested in giving the tiniest [excrement] now about western Jewish populations coming to the disturbing realization that those hordes of minorities that support flooding their country don’t exactly like them too much.”
Mr., Musk responded to the user “you have said the actual truth,” though in his next tweet, he stated his position in more detail and narrowed his focus to the Anti-Defamation League.
“The ADL unjustly attacks the majority of the West, despite the majority of the West supporting the Jewish people and Israel. This is because they cannot, by their own tenets, criticize the minority groups who are their primary threat. It is not right and needs to stop,” he wrote, though his postings still boosted the initial tweet’s signal.
Mr. Musk denied charges of anti-Semitism and planned a visit to Israel on Monday, where he will meet with Israeli President Isaac Herzog and the families of Israelis held by Hamas terrorists in Gaza.
• Alex Miller can be reached at amiller@washingtontimes.com.
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