Elon Musk is on a bit of an apology tour regarding his "go f*ck yourself" comments in November regarding advertisers on X.
While at the Cannes Lions advertising festival on Wednesday, Musk said of his comments, "It wasn't to advertisers as a whole," The Hill reported.
"It was with respect to freedom of speech," he added. "I think it is important to have a global free speech platform, where people from a wide range of opinions can voice their views."
Musk initially told off advertisers last fall after he appeared to agree with anti-Semitic rhetoric in a post from his personal X account.
"Jewish communties (sic) have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them," the post said on X, which Musk replied to, saying, "You have said the actual truth."
Musk addressed the post and apologized for what he said, calling it his dumbest ever social media post. Still, major companies -- including Disney, Apple, IBM, Comcast, Lionsgate, Warner Bros. Discovery, Sony Pictures and Paramount -- began to pull their ad spending on X, something the billionaire said didn't matter to him.
"If somebody is going to try to blackmail me with advertising, blackmail me with money, go f*ck yourself. Go f*ck yourself. Is that clear? I hope it is," Musk said during an interview at a New York Times DealBook Summit.
Now singing a different tune, Musk on Wednesday noted that advertisers "have a right to appear next to content that they find compatible with their brands." But he felt like companies were trying to make a power move and he wasn't playing their game.
"What is not cool is insisting that there can be no content that they disagree with on the platform," he said, per The Hill. "If we have to make a choice between censorship and money or free speech and losing money, we're going to choose the second. We're going to support free speech rather than agree to be censored for money, which is, I think, the right moral decision."