Elon Musk settles legal battle with X advertisers, ending years-long antitrust saga

Elon Musk has settled a long-running legal dispute with advertisers on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. The resolution marks the end of one of the messier corporate feuds to emerge from Musk’s $44 billion acquisition of the social media company back in 2022. How we got here X Corp filed an antitrust lawsuit in August 2024 against the World Federation of Advertisers and several major brands, including Mars, CVS Health, and Colgate-Palmolive. The core allegation was dramatic: these companies had allegedly conspired to boycott the platform and withheld billions of dollars in advertising revenue. The advertising pullback was real and significant. After Musk’s acquisition, some companies slashed their ad spending on the platform by over 70%. The exodus was widely attributed to concerns about changes in X’s content moderation policies and broader brand safety strategies under new ownership. The Global Alliance for Responsible Media, known as GARM, an industry initiative that helped brands coordinate on content safety standards, was dissolved amid the litigation. That dissolution removed one of the organized frameworks advertisers had used to make collective decisions about plat...