Rather unsurprisingly, when advertisers decide not to buy ads from you because you have created a cesspool of racism, bigotry, and misinformation, it is not a violation of antitrust law.
Being Elon's lawyers must be the worst job on earth.
On Thursday, Elon Musk lost his lawsuit alleging that advertisers violated antitrust law by colluding on an ad boycott after he took over Twitter, gutted content moderation teams, and disbanded the Trust and Safety Council.
In her opinion, US District Judge Jane Boyle wrote that the lawsuit was dismissed because Musk failed to state a claim. His arguments that advertisers acted against their own best interests by avoiding advertising on his platform, now called X, did not plead facts showing that consumers were harmed. Without consumer harm, there can be no antitrust violation, the judge wrote, deeming the ad boycott perfectly legal.
“The very nature of the alleged conspiracy does not state an antitrust claim, and the Court therefore has no qualm dismissing with prejudice,” Boyle said. At one point, she emphasized, “the question underlying antitrust injury is whether consumers—not competitors—have been harmed.”
For Musk, the loss is likely significant. He had argued that advertisers should be “criminally prosecuted” after allies in Congress released a report claiming they were conspiring to tank Twitter’s revenue with the supposed goal of censoring conservative voices.………
There are many ways that Musk’s antitrust claims could have succeeded, Boyle noted. He could have argued that the boycott prevented X from competing with other social media companies to “corner the supply against users’ interests.” Or that advertisers were somehow motivated to help a rival platform raise ad prices to exclude X from that market. Or possibly show that the World Federation of Advertisers intended to shut X out in order to launch its own social media ad business.
Much like any official statements regarding his businesses, in the final analysis, there is no, "There," there.
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