Elon Musk tweeted something even he can’t defend

Elon Musk, seen here at the Cannes ad festival, would like advertisers to come back to Twitter. But he also keeps tweeting, so that’s unlikely to happen.

Hey. Did you see Elon Musk’s latest crazy tweet?

Nope, not the one where he suggested that women and men who don’t have enough testosterone aren’t good at thinking. That was three days ago.

And no, not the one where Musk, who is backing Donald Trump in the fall election, announced that [sic] “Democrat Party is literally the party of criminals.” That was two days ago.

I’m talking about the one from Tuesday, where he “promoted a Tucker Carlson interview with a Hitler apologist who downplayed the Holocaust and said Nazis were humane,” as Techmeme succinctly described it.

That one you actually can’t see, because Musk has now taken it down — a rare admission that something terrible he posted was actually terrible. Or, at least, that other people find it so terrible that he doesn’t want to deal with the grief it creates.

I’m not going to get into the substance of the Carlson interview that Musk told his 196.5 million followers was “very interesting” and “worth watching.”

I’m just going to point out, yet again, that this is exactly the kind of thing that explains why advertisers want nothing to do with Twitter, which Musk bought in 2022 and subsequently renamed “X”: It’s because of Musk, and the stuff he tweets.

Twitter’s ad revenue has plummeted since he bought it. And sometimes people tend to overcomplicate the reason why, by throwing around terms like “brand safety.” Twitter would like you to think it’s because of a deep conspiracy among marketers, which is why it is suing some of its former customers.

But again, and almost certainly not for the last time: This is simple. Elon Musk’s ad problem is Elon Musk.

The world’s richest man loves to tweet, and he loves to tweet stupid stuff, and oftentimes that stupid stuff is offensive to lots of people. Like women. Or Democrats. Or people who don’t like Hitler.

And there’s no point in getting into the weeds about whether Musk meant to say that it’s worth listening to someone who said millions of people “ended up dead” in Nazi concentration camps, or that maybe he hadn’t listened to the full interview himself. Or that he says he’s not an antisemite and has visited Auschwitz.

The point is that if you’re an advertiser, you probably don’t need to be on Twitter, because it’s a small platform compared to many digital competitors. And you definitely don’t want to deal with the headaches Musk causes when he tweets stupid stuff. So not advertising there is a super-simple decision.

That’s it. That’s the whole tweet.

I’d say I’ll see you the next time he does the same thing. But we can’t do that every time he does the same thing, because it would get exhausting. Still: See you again, soon.