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Elon Musk is once again going after Disney (DIS) CEO Bob Iger.
After targeting the executive during the New York Times DealBook summit last month, Musk, who owns social media platform X (formerly Twitter) slammed Iger on Thursday, writing, “He should be fired immediately.”
Musk added Walt Disney “is turning in his grave over what Bob has done to his company.”
Disney did not immediately respond to Yahoo Finance’s request for comment.
The posts began after New Mexico’s Attorney General Raúl Torrez filed a civil lawsuit on Wednesday against Meta Platforms (META) and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, a known rival of Musk.
In the suit, Torrez alleged Meta’s social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram “are not safe spaces for children but rather prime locations for predators to trade child pornography and solicit minors for sex.”
Disney, which pulled its advertising from X last month after Musk endorsed an antisemitic post on the platform, still advertises on Meta — prompting Musk to double down on his attack.
“Bob Eiger thinks it’s cool to advertise next to child exploitation material. Real stand up guy,” Musk posted, spelling Iger’s name incorrectly.
At the DealBook event last month, Iger briefly addressed why the company suspended its advertising on the platform, telling the crowd, “By him taking the position that he took in quite a public manner, we just felt that the association with that position, and with Elon Musk, and X, was not necessarily a positive one for us and we decided we would pull our advertising.”
Musk, who spoke after Iger at the summit, vehemently called out Disney and other companies like Coca Cola (KO) and Apple (AAPL), which pulled their advertising from X in recent weeks.
“If somebody is going to try to blackmail me with advertising, blackmail me with money, go f*** yourself,” he said. “Is that clear? I hope it is. Hey, Bob.”
When pressed on the dangers of alienating advertisers, Musk acknowledged that the exodus would eventually lead to the platform’s demise.
“What it’s going to do is it’s going to kill the company,” he said. “And the whole world will know the advertisers killed the company.”
Fixing X’s ad issues ‘not an overnight thing’
According to a report from the New York Times, the fleeing of advertisers could cost X some $75 million.
“We’re talking about large brand advertisers. They don’t use X as a primary platform, so they see X as quite frankly the crumbs that are left over after they spend their big TV budgets,” Mark Douglas, the CEO of advertising software company MNTN, told Yahoo Finance Live earlier this week.
He added that companies that consistently spend big ad dollars, or “performance advertisers,” spend them on Google and Meta where user engagement is much higher.
“Let me put it this way: If [these companies] were driving measurable revenue from X, they wouldn’t cut those budgets. But because they’re not, those budgets were easy to cut,” he said.
Douglas said X will need to work on increasing user engagement, in addition to creating an ad product for smaller advertisers, in order to compete.
“But it’s a tall order,” he warned. “Even if they were determined to do it, that’s a one to two year effort to get done. So it’s not an overnight thing.”
Alexandra Canal is a Senior Reporter at Yahoo Finance. Follow her on Twitter @allie_canal, LinkedIn, and email her at alexandra.canal@yahoofinance.com.
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