Musk Mouth
“Everyone is in favor of free speech … but if anyone says anything back, that is an outrage.” – Winston Churchill
Advertisers gathering for the Cannes Lions festival this week caught a rare treat: Elon Musk groveling.
“I do shoot myself in the foot from time to time,” the genius of our time confessed at the international advertising industry confab in France, “but at least you know it is genuine, not from the P.R. department.”
No public relations department would approve the remarks Musk offered at the Nov. 29 Dealbook Summit. Musk threw F-bombs when asked about a mass exodus of advertisers fleeing pro-Nazi ramblings on his social media platform X, formerly Twitter.
“Don’t advertise. … If somebody is going to try to blackmail me with advertising, blackmail me with money, go fuck yourself. … Go fuck yourself. Is that clear? I hope it is.”
Now he’s in France with X CEO Linda Yaccarino, begging for ad business and trying to take back what he said.
It’s only money – wait, money?
“I’ll say what I want, and if the consequence of that is losing money, so be it,” Musk said in a CNBC interview in May 2023.
Well, maybe not too much money.
“You just can’t tell your customers to get lost,” I wrote about Musk in the April 4 release of Business Blunders, “Because they will do just that, and you’ll be the one with red ink on your face.”
If Musk is in France with his top X lieutenant, trying to spin his way out of this blunder, you can bet he’s finally learning.
His mouth has apparently contributed to steep revenue declines at both X and Tesla. Musk paid $44 billion for Twitter in October 2022 and it now is worth maybe $12.5 billion, according to some estimates. Tesla sales, and its stock, have also suffered profoundly with some Wall Street observers blaming Musk’s antics.
The latest spin
One of the many delusions that powerful people can suffer these days is the belief that they can say and then unsay anything – even when it’s documented on camera.
Musk has had more than six months to clarify his remarks. Now he’s finally saying that he didn’t really mean them.
“It wasn’t to advertisers as a whole,” Musk said in a discussion with Mark Read, CEO of ad giant WPP at Cannes Lions. “It was with respect to freedom of speech.”
Since taking over Twitter, Musk’s crusading for free speech has included:
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Inviting banned users back to the social media site, including conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who dangerously declared that the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax.
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Tweeting in 2022, and then deleting, a bogus report about the attack on former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul, sparking unnecessary outrage.
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Replying in November to a post encouraging people who think “Hitler was right” to speak up. “Jewish communities have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them,” the post read. Musk replied, “You have said the actual truth.”
Big-name advertisers that don’t want to be associated with dangerous and offensive rhetoric – including Coca-Cola, IBM, Merck, NBCUniversal, Walmart and Wells Fargo – took their advertising business elsewhere.
It’s apparently a difficult concept for some people to grasp, but freedom speech does not mean freedom from consequences. Or maybe it does on Mars, where Musk is intent to go with SpaceX.
So here’s how Musk is addressing blunder now:
“I think it is important to have a global free speech platform, where people from a wider range of opinions can voice their views.
“In some cases, there were advertisers who were insisting on censorship.
“At the end of the day … if we have to make a choice between censorship and losing money, [or] censorship and money, or free speech and losing money, we’re going to choose the second.
“Advertisers have a right to appear next to content that they find compatible with their brands. What is not cool is insisting that there can be no content that they disagree with on the platform.”
Too little, too late?
Now his half-hearted retreat is falling flat. Trade publication Ad Age reported that some advertising executives had zero interest in hearing from Musk.
It’s not all that easy to go un-fuck yourself.
