Elon Musk threatens “thermonuclear lawsuit” over Twitter antisemitism report
Musk says he intends to file a lawsuit against Media Matters on Monday, as advertisers flee Twitter over accusations of antisemitic content
Aux News Musk
Elon Musk has now gone from “posting through it” to “irradiated-level incandescent with rage,” apparently, as the Twitter owner and monkey brainchip entrepreneur announced today that he intends to file a “thermonuclear lawsuit” over a recent media report that alleged that his social media network was serving up ads for major companies alongside antisemitic rhetoric. That report, from Media Matters, has presumably been a factor in some of the planet’s biggest brands—including Disney and Apple, long-time Twitter customers—pulling their ads from the platform this week. (Although we might point out that many of these companies also explicitly named some of Musk’s own recent tweets, including one that endorsed a false narrative about Jewish people “pushing…hatred of whites,” as a reason for the ad pulls; it’s not clear yet if you’re allowed to issue a thermonuclear lawsuit to yourself.)
In response to the report, Musk posted his own analysis, which accused Media Matters of deliberately engineering a situation where Twitter was forced to serve up ads near people posting positive comments about Adolf Hitler or the Nazi regime, or engaging in Holocaust denial, by choosing to only follow accounts posting that kind of tripe, and then reloading until ads were placed alongside it. (Which tacitly acknowledges that the platform will do that, if pushed, but that’s apparently neither here nor there.) Musk also, somewhat counter-intuitively, asserted that only one of the posts in question was bad enough to violate Twitter’s terms of service anyway, leaving us to wonder which one it was: The one saying there was “no coherent argument against National Socialism,” or the one quoting Hitler while he’s painted as a quasi-messianic figure, or the one that just straight-up said the Holocaust didn’t happen? Dealer’s choice, perhaps.
Anyway, this is all about free speech, of course, which is why Musk is threatening to sue a media organization (and “Their board, their donors, their network of dark money, all of them”) to smithereens for making the report.
120 Comments
lonny right now reminds me of this:
So he’s suing over the reporting of things he said and did….in public?
He should cut to the chase and sue himself.
I heard if you do that, you go blind.
I sued myself twice today, no problemo.
No, you just get hairy palms.
“I’m gonna take that smirking pustule who runs that electric car company for all he’s worth!” — Elon, snorting his daily mound of K.
He’ll make millions off himself! Always knew he was a genius!
He’s actually suing over the report that shows ads for large companies next to terrible right wing tweets. You know, the thing Media Matters has been reporting on for a year now over and over again. He’s just trying to distract that he’s also an idiot and an antisemite
He should sue them in Australia. He’s win here.
Is he?
Maybe this is a Brewster’s Millions situation and he has to lose all of his money as fast as possible?
No?
I call this move The Kanye: berate a segment of the public for somehow forcing him to do something that no one asked him to in the first place.
Yep. It’s the nuclear opinion or nothing!
If one doesn’t want to be labeled as anti-Semitic then don’t behave like one.
I’ve noticed lots of people I follow have dropped off the site. Now that I know why, I guess I’ll do the same.
I thought you were talking about Kinja for a second smh
Pfffftttttt!!! Anyone can talk the talk, let’s see him walk the walk. (And considering how he’s in the wrong, let’s see how far he gets.)
I’m sure he does it. He has lawyers that will take his money. He isn’t gonna win but this is about looking “strong” in the moment because his ego can’t handle less
They had better demand that money up front.
That’s what a retainer is.
He’s got lawyers on retainer. They’ll file to start the lawsuit, then he’ll have them quietly drop it when it’s time for discovery. He’ll get a couple of “strong” news cycles, and nobody will be paying attention when he backs down
I’m sure he does it.
Musk never does it. He’s loudly threatened to sue others before, and never did.
Ethically, lawyers aren’t supposed to file cases that they know have no legal merit. I’m sure there are a bunch of law firms right now charging him $2k/hour to tell him nicely he has no case.
What are the chances of anyone at Tesla knowing the recent news at OpenAI?
Just asking…
What are the chances of anyone at Tesla knowing the recent news at OpenAI?
Just asking…
This is when you lie low and hope it all blows over, not when you bluster and draw attention to your bigotry. You don’t want giant posters of megacorp ads next to Nazi propaganda shown in court and on the evening news. The recent attempt by some board members to remove him over these statements would probably be offered into evidence as well.Besides, Apple, IBM, and all the others can pull their ads any time they want for any reason or none at all. Twitter does not have a constitutional right to have big companies buy ad space from them.In short, bring it ElMo. Just be prepared for things to get worse for you instead of better.
What did Elmo ever do to deserve that?
Elon couldn’t stop posting if his life depended on it.
Never has there been a man so clearly in need of his father to hug him and tell him he’s proud of him. I can’t imagine being that rich and still having such a fragile ego
You forgot Trump very quickly.
I’d say Elon’s worse than Trump. Not by much, mind you, but definitely more. See, Trump has many people who hate him but at this point I’m pretty sure he sees that as a good thing because it riles up his sycophants and he can make that work for his ends, both political and financial. In a fucked up way, he’s embraced the haters, hell he kinda loves it. Elon on the other hand desperately desperately wants to be seen as cool. Oh sure he tries to take a page out of Trump’s playbook (doing the whole pretending any detractors are just sad losers thing), but you can tell he’s just not selling it. You can see the “please like me” behind every meme.
I mean, both of them are probably very different people if their dads hug them, and that’s my only point here.If I think Trump is worse, it’s only because he’s closer to the button for the nukes.
I don’t know. I think the one threatening to bring full-blown fascism to the most powerful nation in the world and may soon have the power to imprison his political enemies might be worse.
Oh, a worse person for sure, but I mean worse as in “desperately in need of a hug/approval” which I think is Elon. But hey, it’s all subjective, right?
Except Trump needs to be loved too. Remember how badly he reacted to being booed at a stadium?
Remember this picture when he returned to the White House from a small rally?
I’m not so sure he surpasses Trump in that department…Although it is true that he is (or at least was) richer than Trump could ever imagine being.
I mean, twitter aside, Musk seems to actually get involved in promising ventures and then uses his connections and media clout to boost their profile, draw in more funding, and then makes a killing taking them public. Trump is more a parasite in that sense, he just runs businesses into the ground, typically after entering an over saturated market, paying top dollar, loading them up with debt, skimming of the income stream, then selling them off. I say as someone who cannot stand Musk and hopes he falls hard from his perch.
He’s like a less sympathetic version of Kendall Roy.
You mean Errol Musk? Gooooood fuuuuuuuckin luck.
I don’t know if it’s that far fetched. I hear he hugs his step daughter all the time.
Yeah. That’s definitely different, though.
He bought twitter so he could tweet through it all day, every day.
Not forgetting, of course, that those companies (since they’re people, I guess) also have a constitutional right to free speech, and are freely exercising it by pulling their ads off Twitter.I mean, we’re not forgetting. El Musko apparently is.
…and if you’ve actually got grounds for a lawsuit (truth being an affirmative defense to libel and all that), you don’t make public threats; you keep quiet while your lawyers prepare it, then file it.Of course, lawyers would probably point out that he’d have to prove either untruth or malice to have a hope in court in a defamation case (though fear of punchdown by someone with far more resources might usefully suppress the discussion, which could be what he is hoping for).
Well, in theory, if he can prove mediamatters acted with intent to hurt his business, he can get buy on tortious interference. But i think he is losing so much revenue, that he thinks he can sue mediamatters until they back down. What does he care about legal costs? They will get deducted, and besides, what are the odds that twitter survives the next three years at this point. Maybe it will, but geez why buy a company and have to pump billions into it. I mean by all accounts twitter wasnt doing so hot before he bought it revenue wise. Now?
FUCK ELON MUSK. That’s all I wanted to say. Felt good…
Noooooo! Don’t do that. He already has like twenty spawn
What an absolute shitbird imbecile. He’s going to sue people for not advertising on his shitty site, or for pointing out the flagrant anti-Semitism of his shit shite? He’s Trump with an accent, a little pathetic jerk who can’t go away soon enough.
I felt great when I left Facebook ages ago. I felt great when I left Twitter last year. Like, shockingly clear-headed good feelings. Shrugging off applications you don’t really require is a wonderful feeling.
Hm, maybe I need to leave Facebook too.Granted, I’ll have to join it first…
The one thing I feel bad about with this whole musk/twitter fiasco is that I never had an account to quit.
Do it you little bitch. Not all the money in the world will change the fact your from a slave state, your dad doesn’t love you, you barely invented anything, and you openly praised a neo nazi who blamed the Jews for all the worlds problems in the middle of a war with Palestine and Israel.
I’ve always felt like Elon Musk was a poorly-written Bond villain. A tech billionaire, raised in apartheid South Africa, family money from emerald mining (in Zambia), bullied in an all-boys school, etc… He’s the whiny little bitch who now has money and thinks that it makes him important.
Him and Trump would be tossed out characters from a first draft for being too unsubtle.
Trump only works as a believable villain if you set the story in an alternate, hellscape timeline that skewed off of ours in 1955.
I was saying throughout Trump’s presidency that if someone wrote him as a character it would be seen as too unrealistic. It’s bad enough we live in the worst timeline, but it’s intolerable that we live in the stupidest one.
I think he was the bully in school, which still lines up with your theory. Apartheid Clyde was bullying a kid for having a dad who committed suicide, and the kid pushed Musk down the stairs to stop him. Even Musk’s sociopath sex creep daughter fucking dad thought Elon went too far.https://www.news24.com/fin24/economy/elon-musk-made-hurtful-comment-to-fellow-pupil-who-left-him-hospitalised-father-says-20220602
Like a Dollar store Hugo Drax.
You can delete the ‘barely.’ He’s invented literally nothing.
Of course, how silly of me to even give him any credit.
one point of contention, that results in a lot of false connections and outwardly assumptions that puts people outside of the country at risk but…Israel ≠ Jewish As much as the government of the country pushes that propaganda, to equate the two is Zionist talking points and seeks to tie Jews living outside of Israel to the country, putting them in danger for a country and govenretn they have no connection to. For the Zionists this allows them to talk in terms of a monolith, thus twisting and tying together to show larger support. For the anti-semites it allows for actions of the country to be placed on jews everywhere and vice versa. There are Christan and Muslim populations within the boarders, and have been living on the lands for thousands of years. Equating Israel to Jewish seeks to erase these other groups existence from the country. Which is part Zionists plan, which places those populations at risk inside of the country, as we have seen for the last 75 years, as well as people outside of the official lands, as zionists use it as a way of land expansion and expulsion. I know it is challenging to not intertwine the two as there has been 75 years of propaganda around it, trying to intertwine it, but one of the biggest things everyone can do is to separate the country, its politics from the religion. Hell, i have to catch myself at times for intertwining them. Also it is not a war with “Palestine and Israel” It is an ethic cleansing and genocide by the occupying force backed and funded by the largest military power in the world. It is an ongoing part of a conflict that has been going on for 75 years. In the middle of that is conflict between a small group with maybe a budget of 100 million, who have committed vile and terrible acts verses a military industrial complex that over 3 billion is spent on every year who have committed vile and terrible acts every day for 75 years. I get the overall point you were trying to make in your statement but there were some aspects that contribute to the larger communication issue around the conflict, that can unwilling tie people who have no connection to it, to it.
Elon’s empty threat was so moronic that it drove Ken “Popehat” White back on the site:
I now have seen the word “Spavined” used in a sentence. My life is nearly complete.
Straight up if he sues he will have to open the code and company records to discovery. I truly hope he shoots himself in the dick and sues.
Now that might be a truly informative choice for him to make… truly!
“I’m sorry your honor, I fired everyone who knows how to find the code and the printer’s out of something, and yeah… fired them too…”
He will sue because he pays his lawyers to be around and do whatever stupid shit he wants them to do. He’ll then quietly drop the case right when discovery needs to happen.
I love this so much.
Musk is that kid who picks a fight at school with a sucker punch, and then as the table turns, and the other kid gets the upper hand, he immediately starts crying and runs to tell a teacher.
The truth is not far off. Part of Musk’s self-proclaimed “origin story” is he was “bullied” as a child and in once instance was beaten so severely/thrown down the stairs and broke a leg. What he neglects to share is the “bully” who beat him was a child who Musk had been relentlessly mocking because the “bully’s” father had committed suicide.
What a world we might live in, if that kid had finished the job.
And it was his dad who disproved Elon’s fabled origin myth in a public interview – Errol was the one who came out, on record, and said Musk started and deserved getting put in hospital for it: “Even I think Elon went too far”. Another of his favourite origin myths is him getting where he is by being an elite coder – the vaunted Silicon Valley success story who started out with nothing but a computer in a garage and his own bootstraps who washed up in America with nothing but his brain, some gumption, and a dream. In reality, he washed up in Canada first (because it was easier for a South African to get citizenship to America that way) with “only” $10,000. Which is a) more than most people ever have at once, and b) was just his travellin’ money. (And likely the maximum amount of cash you could bring into Canada on a flight.)And, most importantly, he’s a shit coder. He was a business student and physics (at a business school) grad, who claims he got his degrees in 1995 at 24 (when in reality he got them in 1997 at 26) because it makes him look like a genius who only took three years to earn two degrees. The PayPal coders considered him a net drag on the coding side, because they spent more time fixing his code than they saved having him write on it. His whole life is rich boy cosplay.
I agree with everything you said except that $10k, while, perhaps, being more that most immigrants have on them, is not a lot of money. Sure, more than most 18-25 year olds have, but it is hardly indicative of wealth.
Sigh. What point do you believe you are making.
Antisemite and Republican Musk is a hypocrite when it comes to free speech. He bans everyone he doesn’t like. While he is busy suing Media Matters his platform is disintegrating around him. Amen. 🤣
Musk is the kind of person who bets on the Washington Generals.
I thought the Generals were due!I tell you that game was rigged! They were using a freaking ladder!
He’s spinning the ball on his finger! Just take it! Take the ball!
choosing to only follow accounts posting that kind of tripe, and then reloading until ads were placed alongside it. (Which tacitly acknowledges that the platform will do that, if pushed, but that’s apparently neither here nor there.) Um I’m not a lawyer or a programmer but he seems to have just validated the article.Whether they did it deliberately or not, there is a greater than zero chance that there is someone out there with that algorithm, so the Media Matters article isn’t a lie by his own investigation?
It makes sense he’d be threatening with a thermonuclear lawsuit.It’s not like a conventional lawsuit would succeed in this case, and chemical/biological lawsuits have been banned on the field of legalese for decades.
I’m actually surprised he’d call it a thermonuclear lawsuit. I would’ve thought he’d be more likely to say it was a blitzkrieg lawsuit.
How about a nice game of chess?
My bro, if you lay down with anti-semites people are going to think you’re an anti-semite. You can’t just give them blue checks and call their tweets ‘absolute truth’ without reaping the consequences.
Important legal factoid: truth is an absolute defense to defamation.
Bingo. 30 seconds of searching on the Wayback Machine, & the case will be over.
Yep. It’s basic defamation/libel law. You can’t lose a libel suit if what you wrote can be proven to be the truth. So if Media Matters has the picture of the ads next to antisemitic content, then case closed. Finding for the defendant.
(Not so) Fun fact: Defamation in japan is still illegal even if it’s the truth.
The point of lawsuits like this is to bankrupt your enemies. Not win the case.This has been your daily reminder that our legal system is far from perfect.
I have to imagine their legal team is aware of anti-SLAPP laws.
Yes, let’s just nuke all the Jews. Elmo would absolutely be in favor of that – this year’s Israel/Hamas war where everyone’s an asshole aside, he’s happily back in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion shit.
I’m sure this will be a pleasant discourse…
As a weird nerd myself, I feel attacked by this meme.
Oh uh…not YOU of course…
Interestingly enough I think most people on this site are firmly tired of Musk’s shit.
I do remember back in the day, an article on Musk would have several vocal defenders in the comments, insisting he was a great man. You don’t see so much of that these days.
They and the NFT bros seemed to have shut the fuck up, or at least pivoted to being AI bros.
You really don’t. I believe in the AVC article on Musk proceeding this one a commenter said something about him becoming a comic book villian over the course of the last x number of years, but before that he was a good guy. It felt really skeptical reading that comment, but I guess that was the vibe at one time.
“I believe in the AVC article on Musk proceeding this one”
The poster very specifically said “I do remember back in the day”.
Look I like the fact that the guy supports space exploration and electric cars, but that does not mean he can’t be a narcissistic, bigoted asshole.
Uh…he’s absolutely terrible. What the hell are you talking about?
He is terrible, but he supports a lot of good things (in addition to a lot of bad things). We do not live in a Manichean world.
Cool, thanks for playing.
No need to be an asshole.
Condescendingly telling me “we do not live in a Manichean world” is asking me to meet you more than halfway. That said, being an asshole is kind of my preferred resting position, so I guess “cope” as the kids say. You put words in my mouth with your first comment, then pretty much walked it back with the second. Kinda seems like you want someone to fight with.
I did not put any words in your mouth, nor did I walk back anything, My position has been consistent from the beginning, My first comment was to basically agree with you, but you reacted badly to that.
Discovery-mas a media org’s favorite holiday.OTOH, odds are that he doesn’t file a damn thing.
He’s 100% going to file. He’s got lawyers for days, available 24/7. They’ll file suit, he’ll get a few news cycles where he’s interviewed going, “Don’t fuck with the Musk,” Media Matters will have to pay for some lawyers to push this to discovery, and then Musk will quietly pull it and pretend it never happened but still be happy with some positive coverage and having hurt Media Matter’s finances.
He’s 100% going to file.He hasn’t before. This isn’t the first time he’s threatened a lawsuit, and it won’t be the first time that nothing comes of it.
God I can’t wait for that asshole to just pack his shit up and move to Mars
I’m about ready to send Mark Zuckerberg over to kick his ass
Oh hey big shocker!
Rich, cult of fans, dangerous right-wing motivations burbling just under the surface. Thank fuck this guy can’t run for president, because he is a disgustingly perfect fit.
Alright, Elon, that’s enough. Even Britney thinks you’re weird…
Don’t worry. The lawsuit will explode before it reaches court.
Please, please, PLEASE let this asshole sue. I want everything he’s done on Xitter (pronounced ‘shitter’) to be public record.
1. Stop calling him a genius.2. The press needs to ignore him even if he is rich.3. He know being called an anti-semite is somehow??? worse than being an anti-semite? Wow!