“I prefer peace, but if they want war, they will get it.” - Elon Musk, 6.3.23
This is what I imagine is currently happening behind the scenes at Twitter.
Twitter is being held hostage by an organized group of advertisers threatening to pull their ad spending, which will bleed the company dry.
We know this because yesterday on a space with RFK Jr., Elon said as much. Organizations feel pressure from advertisers to “toe the line. “They are trying to drive Twitter bankrupt,” he said in response to RFK Jr.’s anecdote about being blocked from appearing on Fox News by his friend Roger Ailes.
RFK Jr. said that Ailes admitted to him that if a Fox journalist had him on as a guest, said journalist would be instantly fired by Rupert Murdoch. Why? Because Big Pharma composes the vast, overwhelming majority of ad spending on the network. “If there are 22 ads on a nightly show,” explained RFK Jr., "17-18 of those ads will be for big pharmaceuticals.” And RFK Jr. is an outspoken enemy of Big Pharma.
For several years before his firing, Big Pharma opposed Tucker Carlson publicly. He was even skewered in pharma trade publications (very rare) after Soros-funded censorship org Media Matters dug up his radio show call ins with “insensitive comments.” Drugmaker AstraZeneca pulled funding for the show, as did Takeda Pharmaceuticals, along with 26 other advertisers like Jaguar Land Rover, Ancestry.com, Just for Men, and TD Ameritrade. Flash forward to this year, when Carlson was fired shortly after a segment criticizing Pfizer. A similar thing happened to James O’Keefe.
Conglomerated Advertisers
To imagine that all of these corporations independently came to the decision to abandon Carlson at the exact same time is ridiculous—as ridiculous as believing that Twitter, Google, and Facebook all happened to simultaneously decide to ban Alex Jones or Andrew Tate. These actions are coordinated by censorship organizations like Media Matters and by international “stakeholder capitalists”/ESG-proponents like BlackRock.
Media Matters is known for initiating leaks that just-so-happen to coincide with groups of advertisers pulling their ads from certain platforms. Another censorship org, the ADL, is known for making lists of problematic thinkers, e.g. Jones and Tate, and for pressuring platforms (like Twitter and Substack) to ban them. We also know from the Twitter Files that intelligence agencies have joined both non-profits and large corporations in their efforts to censor problematic (right wing) voices, which is why Matt Taibbi labeled the whole enterprise “The Censorship Industrial Complex.” The network of Ivy League apparatchiks—mostly longhouse harridans like Bud Light’s Alissa Heinersncheid—control the majority of marketing budgets and will do whatever they’re told.
Linda Yaccarino, the new Twitter CEO, is just such a harridan. Elon is smart, and his best skill, according to Peter Thiel, is sales. Elon is battling with advertisers to stay on the platform, as nearly half of them have pulled their spends. This is why he hired Yaccarino—to sell not ads, but advertisers.
Carrots and Sticks
But it’s a strange battle, because he simultaneously must wield the carrot and the stick against advertisers threatening to the leave the platform, alternatively charming them and making them suffer. He convenes with these advertisers behind closed doors through a centralized point of contact, probably some chief harridan such as Yaccarino herself, negotiating with them just as a union would collectively bargain with a group of employers. This is why he keeps making promises about censoring ideas on the platform, saying it can’t become a “free-for-all hellscape,” banning Kanye, and thanking the advertisers, like Disney and Apple, who have stuck around. Then he’ll turn around and accuse advertisers of manipulating speech, and amplify the people (like Trump) and content (like What is a Woman) that they’ve asked him to censor in exchange for buying ads on the platform.
Elon’s ominous tweets at various junctures indicate that he does this because his behind-the-scenes negotiations keep falling apart. Each time they do, Elon re-institutes a problematic individual or highlights a piece of content they hate. Early on, Elon re-instituted Trump’s account and initiated mass anon amnesty shortly after tweeting about advertisers going back on their agreement to stay on the platform. More recently, Elon did a double take with Daily Wire’s Twitter release of What is a Woman. At first, appartchik-harridan Ella Irwin, the head of censorship (AKA Trust and Safety) at the company (probably placed in the role as a bone thrown to the conglomerated advertisers in the first place) managed to censor release of the film. Daily Wire didn’t manage to get through to Elon until its planned release day, which prompted them to publicly vent their frustration, which indeed drew Musk’s attention. He said the censorship was a mistake, but seemed to hedge, tweeting that the film’s release would be throttled because advertisers have a right to determine what content their ads appear next to.
But then, it would appear that tenuous deal broke down as Ben & Jerry’s indicated it would stop advertising on Twitter. Elon went to work. First, he responded to the news with a reply tweet “what are they talking about?” He not only uncensored What is a Woman, but promoted it himself with a tweet saying “every parent should watch this.”
Look at Musk’s replies from days after the Ben and Jerry’s news—he’s doing two things, first amplifying criticism of gender identity, the same topic explored by What is a Woman, and going hard after BlackRock, with repeated replies highlighting BlackRock CEO Larry Fink’s admission of manipulating the public and private spheres via ESG and DEI. What this tells me is that BlackRock is behind the Censorship Industrial Complex, and that every time negotiations with Musk break down, he’s going to make them bleed.
Of course Elon also Tweeted “I prefer peace, but if they want war, they will get it” during the same period. He also tweeted just “.”, which seemed like a comment on the Department of Agriculture’s Pride Month tweet “Period.” A few weeks prior, Musk went after Soros himself, comparing him to Magneto, surely a veiled reference to Soros’ status as a holocaust-survivor taking out his trauma on the world, which both he and Magneto share in common. Musk said Soros “hates humanity.” This wasn’t just a random insult—he’s paying Soros back from influencing advertisers to leave the platform via Media Matters.
This was just the stick. He also went with the carrot, praising McDonald’s and Axe for their “great interaction between brands.” He’s also sent similar signals in the direction of Apple, lauding them publicly for fully returning to the platform.
These were both clearly the result of handshake deals made behind closed doors, then broken by the advertisers. Mainstream media joined the chorus of Musk-hate, accusing him of being the promise breaker. Google “Musk broken promises” and you’ll see 5-10 identical hit pieces.
The Brand Safety Lie
But doesn’t this seem all a bit strange? If the advertisers need to advertise, why are they so willing to pull their money from Twitter? Surely they wouldn’t be so daring with Google or Facebook, who drive 85% of all online sales. Furthermore, isn’t Elon making Twitter Blue happen? Why is he so reliant on advertisers in the first place?
The explanation is deceptively simply, although many of those outside the ad world don’t fully grasp what’s going on. It begins with the notion of “brand safety, one of Corporate America’s (now Corporate Global’s) favorite legal fictions, one that before Bud Light, many centrists and Boomercons still believed was true. Brand Safety refers to the general corporate policy against advertisements appearing near “objectionable content.” The Censorship Industrial Complex loves brand safety, and goes to great lengths to transmit blacklists to harridan-apparatchiks inside media agencies with topics, publications, and even specific words that their brands can’t appear next to.
Formerly, all conglomerated corporate censorship activities were couched in the innocent excuse of brand safety. It’s not that we care about politics, brands told the world, we just don’t want our brands dirtied by controversial content. See, we’re just normal capitalists!
This excuse, of course, fell apart after 2016 and the rise of woke marketing, where brands not only stopped avoiding politically controversial or ugly subjects, they fully embraced them, as long as they were on the extreme left. In doing so, brands made a devil’s bargain—they could damage their enemies and indoctrinate the masses by hijacking mainstream advertising channels, but they could no longer cloak themselves in an apolitical rationale.
Once they were out of the closet, brands became more comfortable throwing their weight around against “free speech” platforms like Twitter. The fact is that big brands don’t need Twitter. Twitter has never managed to successfully monetize its engagement in a way that consistently leads to measurable revenue for advertisers. The lion’s share of a large advertiser’s social budget goes to Google and Facebook with just a tiny percentage going to Twitter, if any at all. The reason for this is that Twitter ads simply don’t convert as well as Facebook, Google, YouTube, and Instagram (no one knows exactly why, but it’s probably because Twitter just isn’t a visual medium).
So why do large brands invest in Twitter ads at all? Well, so they can control the public discourse. Where Twitter falls flat as a vehicle for advertising, it punches far above its weight class in terms of impact on public opinion. So brands, once again led by propagandists like Media Matters and their globalist patrons, invest in Twitter so they can control it. Big Pharma, for instance, has every reason to want criticism of its practices censored, which it knows Elon won’t do.
Between Scylla and Charybdis
Elon is a heroic free speech advocate, but he’s also first and foremost a businessman. From where he’s sitting, the numbers don’t add up. He way over-payed for the business, because he, like Jack Dorsey, understood that in reality Twitter “wants to be a public utility.” But right now, that public utility is being kept afloat by globalist advertisers, who are increasingly Elon’s enemy.
His plan to yank Twitter from their control involves Blue: switching Twitter from an ad model to Substack-style subscriptions platform. The big problem there, however, is that Substack’s revenue is insanely small—it only made $19 million in 2022, and that’s despite massive social impact and 35 million subscribers. Twitter made $5.1 billion in 2021. So if you’re Elon, you’re looking at this massive chasm, and you’re like f**k, how do I bridge this? How do I take this social media behemoth and transfer the entire revenue model from advertising to $8 monthly subscriptions?
He took it private so he at least doesn’t have to answer to shareholders, but that’s not enough. He’s stuck between Scylla and Charibdis—the paltry revenues of Substack or the speech-control of Google/Facebook. Hence he has to cuddle up to advertisers who hate him to bridge the gap between Twitter as compromised amplifier of toxic globalist propaganda and Twitter as genuine public square.
In sum, Elon temporarily balked on his opposition to What is a Woman censorship, citing advertisers’ right to choose what sort of content they appear next to, AKA brand safety. Do global brands actually care if they appear next to What is a Woman, or any controversial political material? Of course not. They know that a Ben and Jerry’s consumer is not going to not buy Ben and Jerry’s because it randomly appears next to What is a Woman. If they cared about alienating anyone, they wouldn’t actively support the most divisive possible political issues on the left.
Rather, under the guise of brand safety and under the leadership of international index funds like BlackRock and censorship organizations like Media Matters, brands have banded together to dictate public discourse as they see fit.
This is Elon’s current war.
How to Help
So how do we help him? First, you buy Twitter Blue. It’s only $8 a month, and it’s an active step towards stopping corporations from controlling people’s minds via censorship and propaganda. My agency WILL made a speculative ad for Twitter Blue for this reason. It now has almost 300k views.
Second, you buy products from the companies, like Apple, that haven’t caved to pressure to pull their advertising. Even better if you click on a Twitter ad then buy directly from the site. That way your purchase will be recorded as an ad conversion, and the value of Twitter ads goes up.
Finally, and most importantly, we must create new companies separate from the toxic network of globohomogeneity that censors us, and we must make beautiful advertisements for these new companies. This what I mean by “We Must Seize the Means of Propaganda.” The woke advertisements currently occupying our airwaves disgust the vast majority of people, and certainly don’t convince anyone to buy anything. We only buy them because they’re convenient and we’re used to it. The products themselves have also been hollowed out—they’re unhealthy ghosts of their former selves, just look at McDonald’s fries (formerly cooked in beef tallow, now seed oil) or Miller/Coors Light (formerly barley, now corn syrup).
As we saw with Bud Light, normal people are now aware that they have a choice. We have an unprecedented opportunity to create new businesses and build ad networks around them. We must create these kinds of businesses, hold them up next to the rotten ones, and let the people decide. These businesses will become the next generation of large corporate advertisers, and they can throw their weight around against the communists, instead of in favor of them.
Hopefully they’ll remember where they came from.
The problem is that Elon has neither carrot to offer advertisers nor stick to beat them with. Twitter is a small platform, the audience hasn't grown for years, the ad products are terrible both for management and placement, they are uniformly low-quality, non-relevant, and highly redundant to the viewer, and Twitter Blue still has no traction and for all but a tiny sliver of the user base, has become a toxic brand. Elon needs the advertisers far more than they need Twitter.
Nice post. It reminded me of this post by Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of the Verge, in October 2022, where he wrote that Musk was in between a rock and a hard place between Twitter users wanting free speech and advertisers demanding censorship: https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/28/23428132/elon-musk-twitter-acquisition-problems-speech-moderation