Elon Musk responded to the recent controversy surrounding his social media company X on Wednesday while speaking at the DealBook conference.
“I hope they stop. Don’t advertise,” Musk said when asked about the recent decisions from Apple, Disney, and other major companies to no longer advertise on Musk’s platform.
The decision came after Musk appeared to agree with anti-Semitic rhetoric in a post from his personal X account earlier this month.
“Jewish communities (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 did address the post he made on X, apologizing for what he said.
“I should, in retrospect, should not have replied to that one person,” Musk said, before also blaming media outlets for not covering his clarifications before apologizing. “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.”
However, the post and his continued antics led to the decision from major companies to pull their ad spending, 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 fuck yourself. Go f*** yourself. Is that clear? I hope it is,” Musk said to a shocked Andrew Ross Sorkin, who was interviewing him.
But Musk didn’t stop there, as he also called out Disney CEO Bob Iger, who discussed not wanting his company to be affiliated with Musk while onstage at the conference earlier in the day.
“I have a lot of respect for Elon and what he has accomplished. We know that Elon is larger than life in many respects and that his name is very much connected to the companies he founded or owns,” Iger said. “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.”
While dropping his expletives, Musk said, “Hey Bob, if you’re in the audience.”
However, the billionaire didn’t seem to shy away from what the massive decision to pull advertising would mean for his company.
Musk said that what the “advertising boycott is going to do is it’s going to kill the company” and that “everybody on Earth will know” that it happened because of those companies.
According to The New York Times, more than 100 brands have stopped their ads, and the company is at risk of losing $75 million by the end of this year.