Musk threatens ‘thermonuclear lawsuit’ against media watchdog, calls advertisers ‘oppressors’

Published

1 year ago

November 18, 2023

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Elon Musk lashed out at large advertisers and Media Matters, a media watchdog group, on Friday after several major brands decided to pause spending on X, the social media platform he owns and runs as CTO.

Musk wrote late Friday night, “The split second court opens on Monday, X Corp will be filing a thermonuclear lawsuit against Media Matters and ALL those who colluded in this fraudulent attack on our company.” He added, “Their board, their donors, their network of dark money, all of them…” and “the discovery and depositions will be glorious to behold,” in subsequent tweets.

Media Matters for America (MMFA) published a report last week showing ads for mainstream brands on X, formerly Twitter, were running alongside user posts espousing pro-Nazi views. The report came after Musk personally posted a spate of tweets that the White House called an “abhorrent promotion of antisemitic and racist hate.”

In response, advertisers including Apple, Comcast/NBC Universal (parent of CNBC.com), Disney, IBM, Lions Gate, Paramount Global, and Warner Bros. Discovery, then decided to halt their ad spending, at least temporarily, on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.

Musk hawked a paid, ad-free subscription version of X in a tweet after news of suspended campaigns surfaced. He wrote, “Premium+ also has no ads in your timeline. Many of the largest advertisers are the greatest oppressors of your right to free speech.” He did not specify which large advertisers he believes are “oppressors.”

A spokesperson for X, Joe Benarroch, emailed a company blog post to CNBC that alleges Media Matters has “completely misrepresented the real user experience” of the social network.

He also said in the email: “Media Matters created an alternate X account and deliberately followed sensitive accounts to curate posts and get advertising to appear on the account’s timeline to then misinform advertisers about the placement of their posts. These contrived experiences could be created on any social media platform.”

Other social networks like Facebook, Reddit and TikTok, grapple with brand safety and moderation of hateful and false content on their platforms, too. However, Musk himself has drawn ire for personally boosting bigoted viewpoints in his own tweets, including in recent weeks, to his more than 163 million listed followers there.

In late October, an X user complained that a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee was melted down in Charlottesville, Virgina. The bronze was slated for use in new public art that would not glorify the losers of the Civil War. The user, who claimed to be a relative of the general lamented, “my kind is hated and many seek our extinction.” Musk then replied in agreement: “They absolutely want your extinction.”

Last week, Musk agreed with a post falsely claiming that the Jewish people have been pushing “dialectical hatred” against white people. Musk called the antisemitic post “the actual truth,” prompting a backlash from brands, critics and even the White House.

The morning of Nov. 17, the White House admonished Musk saying he had engaged in an “abhorrent promotion of antisemitic and racist hate” which “runs against our core values as Americans.”

Later on Friday, Musk declared a new policy for his social network: “As I said earlier this week, ‘decolonization,’ ‘from the river to the sea’ and similar euphemisms necessarily imply genocide. Clear calls for extreme violence are against our terms of service and will result in suspension.”

The ADL’s CEO Jonathan Greenblatt has praised Musk’s promise to suspend accounts engaging in what he views as genocidal speech. Musk has been unwaveringly critical of the Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish-led organization that fights hate speech and discrimination. He also previously threatened to sue, but has not yet sued, the ADL.

It is not clear whether or when X Corp. will actually file a suit against Media Matters, or in which jurisdiction. X is based in San Francisco while the media watchdog is based in Washington, D.C.

Media Matters president Angelo Carusone said in a statement e-mailed to CNBC on Saturday:

“Far from the free speech advocate he claims to be, Musk is a bully who threatens meritless lawsuits in an attempt to silence reporting that he even confirmed is accurate. Musk admitted the ads at issue ran alongside the pro-Nazi content we identified. If he does sue us, we will win.”

— CNBC’s Jonathan Vanian contributed reporting

Technology

Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer says, as shareholder, tariffs are ‘not good’

Published

4 hours ago

April 4, 2025

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Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer says, as shareholder, tariffs are 'not good'

President Trump’s new tariffs on goods that the U.S. imports from over 100 countries will have an effect on consumers, former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told CNBC on Friday. Investors will feel the pain, too.

Microsoft’s stock dropped almost 6% in the past two days, as the Nasdaq wrapped up its worst week in five years.

“As a Microsoft shareholder, this kind of thing is not good,” Ballmer said, in an interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin that was tied to Microsoft’s 50th anniversary celebration. “It creates opportunity to be a serious, long-term player.”

Ballmer was sandwiched in between Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and current CEO Satya Nadella for the interview.

“I took just enough economics in college — that tariffs are actually going to bring some turmoil,” said Ballmer, who was succeeded by Nadella in 2014. Gates, Microsoft’s first CEO, convinced Ballmer to join the company in 1980.

Gates, Ballmer and Nadella attended proceedings at Microsoft’s Redmond, Washington, campus on Friday to celebrate its first half-century.

Between the tariffs and weak quarterly revenue guidance announced in January, Microsoft’s stock is on track for its fifth straight month of declines, which would be the worst stretch since 2009. But the company remains a leader in the PC operating system and productivity software markets, and its partnership with startup OpenAI has led to gains in cloud computing.

“I think that disruption is very hard on people, and so the decision to do something for which disruption was inevitable, that needs a lot of popular support, and nobody could game theorize exactly who is going to do what in response,” Ballmer said, regarding the tariffs. “So, I think citizens really like stability a lot. And I hope people — individuals who will feel this, because people are feeling it, not just the stock market, people are going to feel it.”

Ballmer, who owns the Los Angeles Clippers, is among Microsoft’s biggest fans. He said he’s the company’s largest investor. In 2014, shortly after he bought the basketball team for $2 billion, he held over 333 million shares of the stock, according to a regulatory filing.

“I’m not going to probably have 50 more years on the planet,” he said. “But whatever minutes I have, I’m gonna be a large Microsoft shareholder.” He said there’s a bright future for computing, storage and intelligence. Microsoft launched the first Azure services while Ballmer was CEO.

Earlier this week Bloomberg reported that Microsoft, which pledged to spend $80 billion on AI-enabled data center infrastructure in the current fiscal year, has stopped discussions or pushed back the opening of facilities in the U.S. and abroad.

JPMorgan Chase’s chief economist, Bruce Kasman, said in a Thursday note that the chance of a global recession will be 60% if Trump’s tariffs kick in as described. His previous estimate was 40%.

“Fifty years from now, or 25 years from now, what is the one thing you can be guaranteed of, is the world needs more compute,” Nadella said. “So I want to keep those two thoughts and then take one step at a time, and then whatever are the geopolitical or economic shifts, we’ll adjust to it.”

Gates, who along with co-founder Paul Allen, sought to build a software company rather than sell both software and hardware, said he wasn’t sure what the economic effects of the tariffs will be. Today, most of Microsoft’s revenue comes from software. It also sells Surface PCs and Xbox consoles.

“So far, it’s just on goods, but you know, will it eventually be on services? Who knows?” said Gates, who reportedly donated around $50 million to a nonprofit that supported Democratic nominee Kamala Harris’ losing campaign.

— CNBC’s Alex Harring contributed to this report.

WATCH: There will be many LLM winners, says infrastructure investor Morrison

Technology

AppLovin can offer TikTok ‘much stronger bid than others,’ CEO says

Published

6 hours ago

April 4, 2025

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AppLovin can offer TikTok 'much stronger bid than others,' CEO says

Piotr Swat | Lightrocket | Getty Images

AppLovin CEO Adam Foroughi provided more clarity on the ad-tech company’s late-stage effort to acquire TikTok, calling his offer a “much stronger bid than others” on CNBC’s The Exchange Friday afternoon.

Foroughi said the company is proposing a merger between AppLovin and the entire global business of TikTok, characterizing the deal as a “partnership” where the Chinese could participate in the upside while AppLovin would run the app.

“If you pair our algorithm with the TikTok audience, the expansion on that platform for dollars spent will be through the roof,” Foroughi said.

The news comes as President Trump announced he would extend the deadline a second time for TikTok’s Chinese-owned parent company ByteDance to sell the U.S. subsidiary of TikTok to an American buyer or face an effective ban on U.S. app stores. The new deadline is now in June, which, as Foroughi described, “buys more time to put the pieces together” on AppLovin’s bid.

“The president’s a great dealmaker — we’re proposing, essentially an enhancement to the deal that they’ve been working on, but a bigger version of all the deals contemplated,” he added.

AppLovin faces a crowded field of other interested U.S. backers, including Amazon, Oracle, billionaire Frank McCourt and his Project Liberty consortium, and numerous private equity firms. Some proposals reportedly structure the deal to give a U.S. buyer 50% ownership of the company, rather than a complete acquisition. The Chinese government will still need to approve the deal, and AppLovin’s interest in purchasing TikTok in “all markets outside of China” is “preliminary,” according to an April 3 SEC filing.

Correction: A prior version of this story incorrectly characterized China’s ongoing role in TikTok should AppLovin acquire the app.

WATCH: AppLovin CEO Adam Foroughi on its bid to buy TikTok

Technology

Trump’s tariff rates for other countries radically larger than World Trade data

Published

7 hours ago

April 4, 2025

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Trump's tariff rates for other countries radically larger than World Trade data

U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during an event announcing new tariffs in the Rose Garden at the White House in Washington, April 2, 2025.

Chip Somodevilla | Getty Images

President Donald Trump announced an aggressive, far-reaching “reciprocal tariff” policy this week, leaving many economists and U.S. trade partners to question how the White House calculated its rates.

Trump’s plan established a 10% baseline tariff on almost every country, though many nations such as China, Vietnam and Taiwan are subject to much steeper rates. At a ceremony in the Rose Garden on Wednesday, Trump held up a poster board that outlined the tariffs that it claims are “charged” to the U.S., as well as the “discounted” reciprocal tariffs that America would implement in response.

Those reciprocal tariffs are mostly about half of what the Trump administration said each country has charged the U.S. The poster suggests China charges a tariff of 67%, for instance, and that the U.S. will implement a 34% reciprocal tariff in response.

However, a report from the Cato Institute suggests the trade-weighted average tariff rates in most countries are much different than the figures touted by the Trump administration. The report is based on trade-weighted average duty rates from the World Trade Organization in 2023, the most recent year available.

The Cato Institute says the 2023 trade-weighted average tariff rate from China was 3%. Similarly, the administration says the EU charges the U.S. a tariff of 39%, while the 2023 trade-weighted average tariff rate was 2.7%, according to the report.

In India, the Trump administration claims that a 52% tariff is charged against the U.S., but Cato found that the 2023 trade-weighted average tariff rate was 12%.

Many users on social media this week were quick to notice that the U.S. appeared to have divided the trade deficit by imports from a given country to arrive at tariff rates for individual countries. It’s an unusual approach, as it suggests that the U.S. factored in the trade deficit in goods but ignored trade in services.

The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative briefly explained its approach in a release, and stated that computing the combined effects of tariff, regulatory, tax and other policies in various countries “can be proxied by computing the tariff level consistent with driving bilateral trade deficits to zero.”

“If trade deficits are persistent because of tariff and non-tariff policies and fundamentals, then the tariff rate consistent with offsetting these policies and fundamentals is reciprocal and fair,” the USTR said in the release.