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Elon Musk held a public meeting with some of Twitter’s largest advertisers and marketing partners on Wednesday, broadcasting his vision for the company and looking to keep the organizations that provide it with most of its revenue from abandoning the platform.
The move comes days after Musk — who acquired Twitter in a $44 billion deal last month — threatened a “thermonuclear name & shame” campaign against advertisers that leave the site out of concern for his approach to content moderation.
At a Twitter investors conference in New York on Nov. 4, Elon Musk said pressure on advertisers from unnamed activists was “an attack on the First Amendment.” (Video: Reuters)
Musk spoke to a vetted group of advertisers on “Twitter Spaces,” a live audio conversation feature on the site that is open to anyone to listen to. More than 50,000 people were listening minutes after the session began.
He began his speech by saying his focus is on making Twitter a “force for good.”
Elon Musk courts Twitter advertisers as he seeks new streams of revenue
Last week Musk said Twitter was facing a “massive drop in revenue” as advertisers paused campaigns on the platform. A coterie of large advertisers and marketing agencies have said they will slow down or pause spending on the site while they assess how Musk operates it.
The day before he closed the deal Musk tweeted a statement committing to keeping the site from becoming a “free for all hellscape.” But soon after, he himself boosted a conspiracy theory about the attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, shaking advertisers’ faith that he would maintain rules against misinformation and hate speech.
Musk has been scrambling to shore up the company’s revenue streams, cut costs by laying people off and find new ways to make money as he faces the reality of having to pay around $1 billion a year in interest on the debt he accrued buying Twitter. The vast majority of Twitter’s…
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