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The outburst came in response to questions about companies such as Disney and Apple suspending their advertising on X due to extreme and anti-semitic content
Mr Musk made the remarks in a staged interview in the US yesterday.
He was responding to a question about big brands, including IBM, Disney and Apple, suspending their advertising on X in response to extreme content on the social network, including an anti-semitic tweet endorsed by Mr Musk himself in a response to a user.
“”I hope they stop. Don’t advertise,” said Mr Musk, when asked about the advertising boycott.
“If someone’s going to try to blackmail me with advertising, blackmail me with money, go f*** yourself… Go f*** yourself. Is that clear? I hope it is.”
He then waved to the audience and said “hey, Bob,” a reference to Disney’s returned CEO, Bob Iger, who said at the same conference that placing ads on X now “was not necessarily a positive” for Disney and that the entertainment giant “decided we would pull our advertising.”
The remarks are unlikely to help X’s increasingly stranded CEO, Linda Yaccarino, who has been trying to woo advertisers back to the platform after a year when it has lost 60pc of advertising revenue due to big brands becoming uneasy at ads being placed alongside extreme content now allowed on the social network.
Twitter’s European headquarters are in Dublin. The company has laid off most of its staff here.
Mr Musk also suggested that the boycott could “kill the company” and that advertisers who quit the platform may face repercussions from his followers.
“What this advertising boycott is going to do is it’s going to kill the company, and the whole world will know that those advertisers killed the company and we will document it in great detail,” he said. “Let’s see how Earth responds to that.”
Mr Musk added that he felt regret for a tweet this month which endorsed an anti-semitic theory.
“You have said the actual truth,” he posted on November 15th in response to a tweet that suggested Jewish people were in favour of immigration into the US as part of an agenda of “pushing hatred against whites”, a remark labelled as “racist” and “antisemitic” by the US White House.
The remark was “one of the most foolish—if not the most foolish—thing I’ve done on the platform,” Mr Musk said.
“I should in retrospect not have replied to that one person and should have written in greater length what I meant,” Musk said at the conference. “But those clarifications were ignored by the media and essentially I handed a loaded gun to those who hate me and arguably to those who are antisemitic. And for that I’m quite sorry, that was not my intention.”
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