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Elon Musk to Disney's Bob Iger, Other Advertisers: "Go F*** Yourself"

Elon Musk had some choice words for Disney's Bob Iger and the other advertisers who recently pulled their advertising from Twitter/X.

Earlier this month, heavy-hitting companies such as Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, Lionsgate, IBM, and Apple pulled back on their Twitter/X advertising – the reason or reasons? In the case of Disney (as was confirmed by Disney CEO Bob Iger during a session at The New York Times' DealBook Summit conference), it had to do with Elon Musk supporting & promoting antisemitic hate on his social media service.

In the screencap below, a hatemonger spewed a nonsensical conspiracy theory about Jewish communities "pushing the same kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them." Musk's response? "You have said the actual truth." Later in the thread, Musk also took a shot at the Anti-Defamation League: "The ADL unjustly attacks the majority of the West, despite the majority of the West supporting the Jewish people and Israel. This is because they cannot, by their own tenets, criticize the minority groups who are their primary threat." Iger addressed the issue further during his session – with Musk responding to Iger and other advertisers at the same event later in the day.

"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," Iger explained to interviewer Andrew Ross Sorkin. Has Iger decided on when the ban would end? "I haven't. I haven't really addressed it since the decision was made."

Not helping matters for Musk was a report that Media Matters for America went live with earlier this month that flagged five major companies that had their ads running next to posts promoting antisemitism (including Hitler quotes and Holocaust denial). In response, Musk took to the social media service to confirm that the company had filed a lawsuit alleging that Media Matters had "manipulated the algorithms governing user experience on X to bypass safeguards and create images of X's largest advertisers' paid posts adjacent to racist, incendiary content, leaving the false impression that these pairings are anything but what they actually are: manufactured, inorganic, and extraordinarily rare." In addition, Musk posted and then removed a meme on Twitter/X that promoted the whackjob "Pizzagate" conspiracy theory that accused members of the Democratic Party of child abuse and trafficking.

In a later session during the conference, Musk went the "do-or-die" route when addressing the impact that the advertising boycott would have on Twitter/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," Musk revealed. As for what Iger had to share regarding Disney pulling its advertising, Musk didn't pull punches – clearly still bothered by the move. "Don't advertise. If someone is going to try and blackmail me with advertising? Blackmail me with money? Go fuck yourself," Musk responded. "Go fuck yourself. Is that clear? Hey Bob [Iger], if you're in the audience. That's how I feel, don't advertise."

Later in the session, Musk did take some level of responsibility, sharing that "I should, in retrospect, not have replied to that particular post, and should have expanded in greater length about what I meant." But not so much because it was the wrong thing to do as much as it gave "those who hate me" another reason to criticize him. "I handed a loaded gun to those who hate me," Musk told Sorkin, adding that it was "one of the most foolish" things he's posted on the social media service.

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