Elon Musk filed a lawsuit on Tuesday against an advertising company and several major groups, accusing them of an “illegal” boycott of his platform, which has resulted in losses amounting to several billion dollars.
Musk wrote in a post on the X platform, “We have tried for two years to resolve this peacefully. Let the war begin today.”
Musk accuses the involved companies of anti-competitive practices in a lawsuit filed against the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) in a federal court in Texas. The targeted groups include the “Mars” company and the British-Dutch “Unilever,” both operating in the food sector, as well as the large American pharmacy chain “CVS Health” and the Danish energy company “Ørsted.”
In court documents obtained by AFP, Musk accused the WFA of secretly collaborating through its initiative called GARM (Global Alliance for Responsible Media) with these groups and others to “deprive the X social media platform of billions of dollars in advertising.”
Following Elon Musk’s acquisition of the platform “X,” formerly known as “Twitter,” at the end of 2022, a significant number of advertisers decided to leave the platform for fear that their ads might appear alongside controversial content.
Linda Yaccarino, CEO of the X platform, stated in a video on the platform on Tuesday that “X was a victim of a systematic and illegal boycott.”
X hopes to go to trial and obtain unspecified damages.
According to The New York Times, which accessed internal documents, X achieved only $114 million in revenue in the United States during the second quarter of the year, representing a decrease of 25% compared to the first quarter and 53% compared to the same period last year.
The lawsuit was filed just 24 hours after Musk’s lawsuit against “OpenAI,” the creator of the famous “ChatGPT” program, and its founders, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, whom the head of “Tesla” and “SpaceX” accuses of not adhering to the primary mission of the artificial intelligence-focused company.
