A growing parade of large media and technology companies including Disney,Apple and Warner Brothers haveannounced they would halt their advertising spend on X,uncomfortable with the perception of being associated with hateful content.
Musk himself helped fuel the disquiet,writing on X that he agreed with a social media post accusing “Jewish communities” of pushing “hatred against whites”.
That drew widespread condemnation,including from the White House. “It is unacceptable to repeat the hideous lie behind the most fatal act of antisemitism in American history at any time,let alone one month after the deadliest day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust,” White House spokesman Andrew Bates said in a statement.
The entrepreneur has faced no shortage of crises in the past,but this mass advertiser exodus may be the hardest to come back from.
Before this week’s firestorm,X had already revealed its advertising revenue was down about 60 per cent compared with the same time a year earlier,and a further loss could threaten the ongoing viability of the app.
X had already been crippled by significant staff and engineering losses,after Musk culled 80 per cent of the company’s headcount in a bid to aggressively cut costs. Those cuts also hit X’s content moderation teams,leading to what civil rights groups have described as an uptick in hate speech.