Billionaire Elon Musk threatened legal action Thursday against an alliance that includes some of the world’s biggest companies over an “advertising boycott racket” that has contributed to a revenue crunch at his social media platform X.
Musk, who bought the company formerly known as Twitter for $44 billion in 2022, made the claim in response to a video of Daily Wire founder Ben Shapiro’s Congressional testimony this week on alleged advertiser collusion against conservative platforms.
“Having seen the evidence unearthed today by Congress, X has no choice but to file suit against the perpetrators and collaborators in the advertising boycott racket,” Musk wrote on X. “Hopefully, some states will consider criminal prosecution.”
Shapiro testified Wednesday before a House Judiciary panel in a hearing entitled “Collusion in the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM).”
GARM is an initiative established by the World Federation of Advertisers — which includes Disney, Coca-Cola, Toyota and Hershey among its dozens of members — to “address the challenge of harmful content on digital media platforms and its monetization via advertising,” according to its website.
In the opening statement shared by Musk, Shapiro urged Congress to rein in what he described as “censorship cartels like GARM and executive branch agencies” that disagree with conservative viewpoints.
The subcommittee said it was weighing “whether existing civil and criminal penalties and current antitrust law enforcement efforts are sufficient to deter anticompetitive collusion in online advertising.”
They also released a report from a congressional investigation into GARM that claimed there was bias against conservative media outlets.
“GARM and its members discussed a strategy of blocking certain news outlets like Fox News, The Daily Wire, and Breitbart News,” the report states, pointing to an email from a top executive associated with the coalition stating that he “hated their ideology and bulls**t.”
Representatives for GARM and X did not immediately return a request for comment on Musk’s post.
The mogul has clashed for months with corporate advertisers after many opted to pull their ads from X in response to the billionaire’s decision to loosen content moderation on the app.
He sued the liberal advocacy group Media Matters last November after it published a report claiming that X placed advertisers’ posts alongside content posted by neo-Nazis and white nationalists.
The lawsuit alleged that the report was meant to “drive advertisers from the platform and destroy X Corp.
At the billionaire’s direction, X has shifted toward a subscription-based model to blunt the impact of its losses.
During an appearance at the New York Times’ DealBook summit last fall, Musk admitted that a loss of ad dollars could kill the company and told advertisers who had pulled spending, “Go f—k yourself.”
Musk struck a more conciliatory tone last month during an appearance at the Cannes Lions conference in France, asserting that his incendiary quote was not aimed at all advertisers.
“First of all, it wasn’t to advertisers as a whole. It was with respect to freedom of speech,” Musk said.
Last week, the European Union launched a formal probe over X’s alleged failure to police antisemitic content following the Oct. 7 Hamas attack.
