I know we’re all drinking from the fire hose of news these days, but I could not let the week pass without exploring the veritable hostage video that landed in my timeline earlier this week: X C.E.O. Linda Yaccarino’s uber-bizarre plea to potential advertisers to return to her platform. Yaccarino, of course, serves at the pleasure of the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, who in October 2022 bought Twitter for $44 billion, using $31 billion of equity, before systematically vandalizing the social media platform. He’s now got his C.E.O. essentially begging advertisers to support X, not long after he told Andrew Ross Sorkin at his DealBook conference that these prospective commercial partners could go “fuck themselves,” particularly Disney’s Bob Iger. 

Now Elon has attempted to turn himself into the victim, a tough role for him. This week, X filed an antitrust lawsuit against the Global Alliance for Responsible Media—an initiative that seeks to reduce the occurrence of ads appearing adjacent to harmful social media content—and the World Federation of Advertisers for allegedly boycotting the platform. In an “open letter” to advertisers that accompanied her bizarre video (as well as the lawsuit), Yaccarino cited a House Judiciary Committee report that found GARM and its members “directly organized boycotts” to “target disfavored platforms,” such as X. In the complaint, which was filed in a Texas federal court, X argued that the “conduct” of the defendants “is a naked restraint of trade without countervailing benefits to competition or consumers” and asked for treble damages. “This is not a decision we took lightly, but it is a direct consequence of their actions,” Yaccarino wrote in her letter. “The illegal behavior of these organizations and their executives cost X billions of dollars.” Yaccarino also managed to find the opportunity to plug her business. “In August 2022, people spent 7.2 billion active minutes on the platform,” she wrote. “Today, that number is more than 9 billion, a 25 percent increase.”