A US federal court has dismissed X Corp's antitrust suit against a coalition of major advertisers, dealing a definitive legal defeat to Elon Musk's social media platform.
US District Judge Jane Boyle, sitting in Texas, ruled on Thursday that X had failed to establish that it suffered harm under federal competition law. She dismissed the case with prejudice, meaning it cannot be refiled.
X Corp filed the lawsuit in 2024, naming Unilever, Mars, renewable energy company Orsted, and the World Federation of Advertisers as defendants. The complaint alleged the group had conspired through the WFA's Global Alliance for Responsible Media initiative, known as GARM, to coordinate advertising boycotts that cost the platform billions of dollars. X argued this amounted to illegal collusion in violation of US antitrust statutes.
The defendants denied any wrongdoing. They argued in counter-filings that each company had acted independently when deciding where to allocate advertising budgets, and that X had produced no evidence of coordinated behaviour.
Boyle sided with the defendants. In her opinion she wrote that GARM "did not buy advertising space from X to sell to advertisers nor did it, in such an arrangement, tell X not to sell directly to GARM's customers." She concluded that "the very nature of the alleged conspiracy does not state an antitrust claim."
The lawsuit had its origins in the sharp decline in X's advertising business after Musk completed his $44bn acquisition of Twitter in October 2022. The new owner reinstated previously banned accounts and relaxed content moderation policies, prompting a number of major brands to pause or withdraw advertising. Within a year, advertising revenue had fallen by more than half. Musk at the time declared: "We tried being nice for 2 years and got nothing but empty words. Now, it is war."
The dismissal removes one avenue X had pursued to recoup that lost revenue, and leaves the platform to compete for advertiser spending on its commercial merits.
