You can sue people for choosing not to do business with you?
Musk is such a fucking baby. He has no basis for this. He made major changes to the site, including a complete rebrand, and advertisers left. That’s the fucking free market, and he’s gonna sue?
No sane court? So it has a real chance of being decided by The Supreme Court…
They’d never even hear it. To give this lawsuit any credibility, they’d have to effectively say that businesses spending/donating money is not free speech. Which would effectively be the opposite of Citizens United.
You can sue people for choosing not to do business with you?
You can sue people for whatever you want. But that’s not what they’re suing them for, if you actually read the article. They’re suing for collusion.
X CEO Linda Yaccarino said in a video announcement that the lawsuit stemmed in part from evidence uncovered by the U.S. House Judiciary Committee, which she said showed a “group of companies organized a systematic illegal boycott” against X.
The Republican-led committee had a hearing last month looking at whether current laws are “sufficient to deter anticompetitive collusion in online advertising.”
I don’t know if that’s illegal or not.
It would make an interesting precedent. Bud Light can then sue over the boycott with the whole LGBTQ thing because some didn’t buy their beer. Celebrities being cancelled can try to sue magazines for not running their articles or ads. It’s going to be such an unholy mess.
You can sue your… customers, basically for choosing not to do business with you!?
Even if he wins a one-time payment (no way), how could this do anything but make everyone not want to advertise on Twitter??
I can’t wrap my head around the ridiculousness of it. Or grasp why some US political figures are lapping it up.
Imagine McDonald’s suing you because you didn’t buy enough big macs this quarter. It’s crazy. You’re not automatically entitled to having customers.
Pure speculation on the only real way it could have merit:
Sometimes there actually are contracts for minimum spending. This happens with actual physical products in exchange for a better bulk price, and would usually take extraordinary events to breach the contract on the manufacturer’s side to break as the purchaser, because it may involve stuff like building up manufacturing capacity. In that context, it’s a perfectly legitimate business practice.
The economics of websites are different, but (without direct knowledge of anyone’s practices) it’s within the realm of plausibility that similar contracts exist on big advertising platforms. It’s valuable for larger advertisers to keep price down, and it’s valuable for the platforms to have a steady base level of advertising.
If those contracts do exist, then the case might have the potential to be interesting. How badly does a platform have to materially degrade the value of their advertising before advertisers are able to back out of pre-existing deals? (The other option is collusion, but good luck showing cause for that.)
To quote Legal Eagle on Nebula: it depends. Suppose that the customers had a deal with Twitter granting them special pricing, but on the condition that they spend a certain amount during a given period. Then the customers could be breaching the terms of the contract by dropping out halfway through. I’m not saying that’s what’s happening here, and IANAL of course, but it seems plausible to me.
So what you are thinking is all the media outlets are so shit they didn’t read the case and none of them found it saying, breach of contract. Could be true with how a lot of reporting goes these days, but why would the lawyers for X have not just said, this suit is about breach of contract, not conspiracy to boycott a poor billionaire’s company he is embezzling money to through Tesla?
I haven’t read the case either. But what I do know is the news media isn’t always as nuanced in their reporting of court cases, as the cases warrants.
If that is the case here I don’t know. Musk is a POS, so everything is definitely possible. All I’m saying is that if it actually is a breach of contract, then Musk could have a case.
But imagine signing a contract, where you have to buy a set amount of advertising, with no clause about the site’s conduct and reputation.
This is hilarious.
Should every company, regardless of whether they’ve advertised on Twitter before, be federally mandated to spend a certain percentage of their advertising budget on Musk’s little shitshow?
What, exactly, is the solution he has in mind?
One of the most poignant comments I’ve seen on this is it’s a ploy to draw attention from his PAC and other negative media
While I think it will have that effect, Musk isn’t smart enough to have thought about it that deeply.
Don’t underestimate him. He’s shown he’s a spoiled brat, but he’s not shown that he’s incapable of elaborate and spiteful plots to get his way.
A smart decision in his eyes might be a dumb one in ours but that doesn’t mean he’s actually stupid.
Writing him off as an idiot is a one way ticket to being blindsided while you’re distracted by something else.
ETA: He really is a 13yo in a 53yo body.
