Key facts
- X is seeking to revive a lawsuit alleging advertisers engaged in a group boycott.
- The lawsuit targets the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) initiative.
- X claims GARM's standards led to a distortion of competition and suppressed market forces.
- Advertisers reportedly shied away from X due to concerns about content moderation after Musk's acquisition.
- SpaceX's Q2 2026 advertising revenue was $367 million, a decrease from $426 million in Q2 2025.
- First-half 2026 ad revenue for SpaceX was $710 million, down from $870 million in the prior year.
Elon Musk's social media platform X is seeking to revive a lawsuit against advertisers, alleging they colluded to boycott the platform. X is asking the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals to overturn a previous decision that dismissed the case.
X argues that the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM), an initiative by the World Federation of Advertisers, acted as a cartel. According to X, GARM's members agreed to enforce brand safety standards on social media platforms, thereby suppressing competition and insulating the boycott from market forces.
The lawsuit was filed in 2024, and the ad industry subsequently shut down GARM. However, legal experts have described X's case as weak.
X, formerly known as Twitter, experienced a significant decline in advertising revenue after Musk's acquisition in October 2022, amid concerns over content moderation and the potential for ads to appear alongside objectionable material.
While precise figures have been difficult to obtain since Musk took the company private, recent earnings reports from SpaceX, X's parent company, indicate a substantial drop in advertising revenue. SpaceX reported $367 million in ad revenue for the second quarter of 2026, down from $426 million in the same period of 2025. For the first six months of 2026, ad revenue was $710 million, compared to $870 million in the first half of 2025. This represents a stark contrast to Twitter's reported $1.08 billion in ad revenue for the second quarter of 2022, before Musk's takeover.