Elon Musk Was Just Expressing a “Point of View” by Telling Advertisers to “Go F–k” Themselves, Says X CEO Who Likely Shat Herself as He Did.
When Elon Musk declared in a Wednesday interview that the advertisers boycotting X in response to his endorsement of a wildly antisemitic post should “go fuck” themselves—and specifically called out Disney chief Bob Iger in doing so—he wasn’t committing corporate malpractice or further inflaming tensions because he’s pathologically incapable of introspection.
No, he was, according to the person who made the unfortunate decision to succeed him as CEO five months ago, simply expressing “an explicit point of view.”
Yes, in an post shared on the platform formerly known as Twitter, CEO Linda Yaccarino insisted that what many people saw—that is, a public tantrum by a guy who would rather light a company’s revenue on fire than admit he was wrong—was actually a totally normal articulation of an organization’s official POV.
As a reminder, when asked at the DealBook conference by Andrew Ross Sorkin about his response to the advertiser exodus he caused, Musk replied: “Don’t advertise. If someone is going to try to blackmail me with advertising? Blackmail me with money? Go fuck yourself. Go fuck yourself, is that clear? Hey, Bob, if you’re in the audience. That’s how I feel, don’t advertise.”
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Yaccarino reportedly “sat stone-faced in the front row as Musk commented”—and then, hours later, responded with a statement that very much feels like it was drafted while she asked herself, “What the hell am I doing with my life?”
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