X owner Elon Musk threatened to sue the Anti-Defamation League for “roughly $22 billion” after accusing the civil rights group of chasing away advertisers since he bought the social media site.
The world’s richest man — who over the weekend amplified an extremist campaign to ban the Jewish group — claimed in a tweetstorm Monday night that the ADL was trying to shut down the site formerly known as Twitter by “falsely accusing it and me of being antisemitic.”
“To clear our platform’s name on the matter of anti-Semitism, it looks like we have no choice but to file a defamation lawsuit against the Anti-Defamation League … oh the irony!” he said.
Musk, who bought the site for $44 billion last October, blamed a 60% drop in advertising sales on the group.
“Based on what we’ve heard from advertisers, ADL seems to be responsible for most of our revenue loss,” Musk wrote.
When a fellow X user questioned if ADL “alone [is] seriously responsible for destroying half the value of the company,” Musk replied: “Giving them maximum benefit of the doubt, I don’t see any scenario where they’re responsible for less than 10% of the value destruction, so ~$4 billion,” he added.
Musk also claimed that “document discovery of all communications between The ADL and advertisers will tell the full story.”
An email sent Tuesday to the Musk-owned site about whether the lawsuit has been filed bounced back with an autoreply: “We’ll get back to you soon.”
The ADL would not comment on Musk’s threat.
The group, which touts on its website that it works “to stop the defamation of the Jewish people,” has slammed Musk for not cracking down on hate speech since taking over the site.
Last Wednesday, ADL Director Jonathan Greenblatt met with X’s recently installed CEO Linda Yaccarino about the continued violation of the site’s conduct policies. Their meeting led notorious extremist pundit Eva Vlaardingerbroek to launch a #BantheADL campaign the following day.
On Saturday, Musk elevated the hashtag by tweeting: “Perhaps we should run a poll on this?”
The ensuing controversy led Musk to tweet Monday: “To be super clear, I’m pro free speech, but against antisemitism of any kind”
An ADL spokesperson said of the campaign to ban the group that it’s “unsurprised yet undeterred that anti-Semites, white supremacists, conspiracy theorists and other trolls have launched a coordinated attack on our organization. This type of thing is nothing new.”
“Such insidious efforts don’t daunt us. Instead, they drive us to be unflinching in our commitment to fight hate in all its forms and ensure the safety of Jewish communities and other marginalized groups,” the spokesperson added.
In May, the organization found that 65 accounts that were previously banned from the platform for violation of hateful conduct policies had been reinstated.
The ADL claimed that “although the reinstated accounts themselves rarely posted explicit antisemitic content,” there were “antisemitic tropes, veiled attacks, and conspiracy theories among their networks of followers.”
In March, another ADL report said that X was not enforcing its own content moderation policies, and Musk wasn’t “deboosting and demonetizing” hateful tweets as promised.
Musk has recently sued another anti-hate speech group, the Center for Countering Digital Hate, in a lawsuit accusing it of damaging X’s relationship with advertisers, according to The Guardian. CCDH has said it will fight the lawsuit and keep holding “Twitter’s feet to the fire.”
Yaccarino, who was tasked with restoring relationships with advertisers after being hand-picked by Musk in May, claimed last month that X has improved it hate-speech moderation from its previous owners.
“By all objective metrics, X is a much healthier and safer platform than it was a year ago,” said Yaccarino, who was lured away from Comcast in May.
Several top advertisers have boycotted X since Musk took over, including Audi and Pfizer.
In May, a Fidelity valuation severely marked down the value of the social media site from the $44 billion Musk paid last October to $15 billion just six months later.
Fidelity’s own stake in the platform also plunged from nearly $9 million at the time of Musk’s takeover to nearly $6.5 million as of April 28
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