During the New York Times Dealbook Summit, various speakers took the stage throughout out the day. At one point, Elon Musk, the owner of X (Twitter), was interviewed by Andrew Ross Sorkin about companies pulling their advertising money from X over a Tweet Musk made that was interpreted as “anti-Semitic.”
Companies like Disney pulled their advertising and refused to Tweet on the platform, but Disney has since started Tweeting again. However, they are not paying to advertise.
Musk said that the boycott was going to hurt X.
“What this advertising boycott is going to do is, it is going to kill the company. And the whole world will know that those advertisers killed the company.”
He equated the move to “blackmail,” saying:
“Don’t advertise. If someone is going to try and blackmail me with advertising? Blackmail me with money? Go f*ck yourself. Go f*ck yourself, is that clear? Hey Bob, if you’re in the audience. That’s how I feel, don’t advertise.”
Earlier in the day Bob Iger was also interviewed and had given this statement on Elon Musk.
“I have a lot of respect for Elon and what he’s accomplished. Not just you know, one business, but a few businesses. And we know Elon is larger than life in many respects, and that his name is very much tied to the companies he either founded or he owns, whether it’s Tesla or SpaceX, or now X. And by him taking the position that he took in quite a public manner, we just felt that the association with that position and Elon Musk and X was not necessarily a positive one for us. And we decided we would pull our advertising.”
At this time, Bob Iger doesn’t know if Disney will turn the advertising back on.
Interestingly, Iger was considering buying Twitter and adding it to the Walt Disney Company, but didn’t do so because of the “nastiness” he saw.
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