Elon Musk’s New Lawsuit Proves He’s a Whiny Little Baby

Elon Musk is hoping to scare advertisers into returning to X (formerly Twitter) by suing a group of advertisers who he claims concocted a plan to cost his social media company billions of dollars.

The billionaire technocrat filed a lawsuit Tuesday against the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, or GARM, a coalition of advertisers, media agencies, and platforms that focus on safety in media and technology, accusing them of coordinating a campaign to stop working with him. The lawsuit also targets the World Federation of Advertisers, which oversees GARM, and four of its members: CVS Health, Mars, Unilever, and Orsted.

Ever since Musk took over as the owner of X, bringing with him a rise of antisemitism and hate speech on the social media platform, advertisers have fled en masse. In November, shortly after Musk promoted a neo-Nazi talking point, Media Matters published a report saying that X had been placing ads for brands including Apple, Bravo, IBM, Oracle, and Xfinity next to posts promoting Hitler and Nazi beliefs.

After Musk levied a profanity-laced tirade against advertisers for leaving him, he continued to elevate hate speech on X. In May, he invited neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes back to the platform after he’d been banned.

As a result, X’s revenue has taken a dive. X earned $114 million in the United States in its second quarter, a 25 percent decline from its first quarter and a 53 percent decline from the same period last year, according to documents obtained by The New York Times.

But Musk claims it wasn’t his own support of hate speech that scared advertisers away. He thinks GARM is responsible.

In the nearly two years since Musk took over, 18 companies represented by GARM stopped advertising on the platform altogether, while dozens more shrank their spending by 70 percent, according to the lawsuit. Even as X dropped the prices of its ad spots to lure advertisers back, none returned. Musk’s lawsuit argues that advertisers’ failure to come crawling back constitutes an antitrust violation.

“By refraining from purchasing advertising from X, boycotting advertisers are forgoing a valuable opportunity to purchase low-priced advertising inventory on a platform with brand safety that meets or exceeds industry standards,” the lawsuit said.

In an open letter posted by X CEO Linda Yaccarino, she cited a report published in June by the House Judiciary Committee, titled “GARM’s Harm.”

“Evidence obtained by the Committee shows that GARM and its members directly organized boycotts and used other indirect tactics to target disfavored platforms, content creators, and news organizations in an effort to demonetize and, in effect, limit certain choices for consumers,” the report said.

“To put it simply, people are hurt when the marketplace of ideas is undermined and some viewpoints are not funded over others as part of an illegal boycott,” Yaccarino wrote in her letter, before accusing the defendants of cheating X out of billions of dollars.

It seems that other platforms were inspired by Musk’s war on advertisers. Rumble, a right-wing video-sharing platform, signed onto Musk’s lawsuit.

“I strongly encourage any company who has been systematically boycotted by advertisers to file a lawsuit,” Musk wrote Tuesday X. “There may also be criminal liability via the RICO Act.”

Ruben Schreurs, the chief strategy officer at Ebiquity, a marketing and media consulting firm, told The New York Times that to advertisers, Musk’s claims sound “so far-fetched and frankly ridiculous.”

“To the extent that Elon hadn’t already burned all bridges and ties with the entire advertising community, I don’t see how this will get any advertisers to come back to X,” Schruers said. “It’s a last-ditch effort to force brands who don’t want to be in the cross hairs of this kind of legal action to return to the platform.”

While one might think that you can’t actually sue someone for not wanting to work with you, it doesn’t mean that Musk won’t try.

Organized labor is giving a resounding thumbs-up to Kamala Harris’s vice presidential pick.

Following Harris’s announcement Tuesday that Minnesota Governor Tim Walz would be her running mate, union endorsements poured in one by one.

The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations, or AFL-CIO, the largest federation of unions, announced its support of Walz. “By selecting Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate, Kamala Harris chose a principled fighter and labor champion who will stand up for working people and strengthen this historic ticket,” said Liz Shuler, president of AFL-CIO.

Another exciting endorsement came from the United Auto Workers, which had initially taken longer to endorse Harris. “Tim Walz has been a great governor and is going to make a great vice-president. He’s stood with the working class every step of the way, and has walked the walk, including on a UAW picket line last fall,” said UAW President Shawn Fain, who leads nearly 400,000 active members, including more than 100,000 in the swing state of Michigan.

Other unions also celebrated Walz’s pick, including the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, or AFSCME, the National Education Association, or NEA, and the American Federation of Teachers, or AFT, with their union president, Randi Weingarten, writing that the “AFT’s 1.8 million members will stand with Walz and Harris over the next 12 weeks as they campaign to realize the promise and potential of America.” Union leader Sara Nelson of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, or AFA, also chimed in, writing that Walz is “in touch with the country and what we need to win.”

Prior to Harris’s announcement, more than two dozen labor leaders in Minnesota sent a letter to Harris asking her to pick Walz as her running mate. 

In his time as governor, Walz fought for Minnesota workers, passing paid sick leave, parental leave, and protections from noncompete agreements and anti-union meetings. He also passed the “nation’s strongest set of protections against wage theft.”

Before working in politics, Walz was a social studies teacher and union member.

Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance is desperately trying to find a line of attack after Minnesota Governor Tim Walz’s addition to the Democratic presidential ticket. And all he’s come up with so far is that Kamala Harris is caving “to the Hamas wing of her own party.”

Vance made the remarks after his flight landed in Philadelphia Tuesday morning, where he later spoke at a rally for the Trump campaign.

“Many, many people said repeatedly that the reason Kamala Harris was going away from the Josh Shapiro selection is because they were worried about antisemitism,” Vance said on the plane. “They were worried about certain voters; they were worried about some of the leaders and the grassroots activists in their party wouldn’t take a Jewish nominee.

“I think it’s despicable. I think it’s disgusting. But that is right out of the words of many members of the Democratic leadership, and so now we have Tim Walz,” Vance added.

Later, at a press conference in the city of brotherly love, Vance again claimed that Harris and the Democrats were motivated by prejudice by not choosing Shapiro.

“I genuinely feel bad that for days, maybe even weeks, the guy actually had to run away from his Jewish heritage because of what the Democrats are saying about him. I think that’s scandalous and disgraceful,” Vance said. “Whatever disagreements on policy you have about somebody, the fact that that race, the vice presidential race on the Democratic side, became so focused on his ethnicity, I think is absolutely disgraceful.”

Vance’s comments seem to be piggybacking on attacks on Walz from earlier on Tuesday. Several Republicans, including Senator Tom Cotton, called the decision to choose Walz over Shapiro antisemtic. Even before the Harris campaign made the announcement, Vance claimed that Democrats’ overlooking Shapiro would be due to antisemitism.

If this is what Republicans think will work, it’s kind of a joke. Neither Vance nor Trump are Jewish, and of the 33 Jewish members of Congress, only two in the House are Republicans, with zero Jewish Republican senators. Harris’s husband, Douglas Emhoff, as well as her two stepchildren, are Jewish.

This attack certainly won’t stop people from calling Vance and Trump weird, especially since the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, also happens to be Jewish, which he pointed out on X in response to these attacks.

Meanwhile, Trump isn’t making any campaign appearances until Friday, when he’s scheduled to speak in Montana, while the Harris campaign’s schedule is packed with battleground states with only Vance making similar stops. And that isn’t the only way the Trump campaign is trailing Harris’s, aside from the polls: Vance tried to call Walz earlier Tuesday morning, but only got his voicemail.

Donald Trump’s campaign is taking aim at Minnesota Governor Tim Walz for backing a policy that gives convicted felons the right to vote, conveniently forgetting that their candidate is also a convicted felon.

Trump campaign press secretary Karoline Leavitt released a statement Tuesday decrying Vice President Kamala Harris’s selection of “Radical Leftist Tim Walz” as her running mate.

Leavitt criticized Walz for “embracing policies to allow convicted felons to vote,” as part of his obsession “with spreading California’s dangerously liberal agenda far and wide.”

As Minnesota governor, Walz signed a bill in June 2023 restoring the right to vote to more than 50,000 Minnesotans on parole, probation, or community release due to a felony conviction.

Despite Leavitt’s griping, Trump himself is the beneficiary of a policy allowing convicted felons to vote.

Trump is currently still eligible to vote in Florida, where he is registered, because Florida election law says that he has that right so long as he is able to vote in the state where he was convicted. In New York state, a person is only disenfranchised while incarcerated, so unless Trump is sentenced to prison in his New York hush-money trial, he can still vote, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.

In an astounding feat of doublethink, Team Trump seems to want voters to be angry that convicted felons can vote, while simultaneously hoping that they’ll vote for a convicted felon—and that said convicted felon can vote for himself come November.

After Minnesota Governor Tim Walz was chosen as Kamala Harris’s running mate, Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders immediately attacked him—only to get trolled by the internet.

“In her first big decision Kamala reveals who she answers to—the far left,” Sanders posted on X (formerly Twitter) Tuesday morning. The replies to her tweet quickly called her out.

Several commentators pointed out the contrast between their records as governors—Sanders loosened child labor protections while Walz made school lunches free. Even their photo ops with children show disappointment versus happiness.

Others pointed out the absurdity of calling Walz “far left”—as if that attack line would work on a military veteran, high school football coach, and teacher.

These early attacks, along with a panicked angry email from the Trump campaign, show that the GOP doesn’t have much of an attack line against Walz right now. It’s fitting that the man who coined the Democrats’ favorite “weird” criticism of Republicans isn’t easily attacked himself. On top of that, Trump and Republicans still haven’t come up with a good way to attack Harris. The only question is whether all of this will lead to Democrats retaining the White House in November.