X advertisers remain silent after Grok goes off the rails and CEO resigns

NBC News

5 days ago

Most major advertisers on X are choosing to remain silent about their plans and relationship with the company after the platform's AI chatbot, Grok, went on a racist and antisemitic posting spree Tuesday and X's CEO Linda Yaccarino announced her resignation the next day.
The silence from advertisers following Grok's praise of Hitler and promotion of antisemitic conspiracy theories stands in a stark contrast to the advertising community's response in 2023, when companies like Apple, Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery publicly paused their spending on X after owner Elon Musk agreed with a user who posted that Jewish communities had pushed 'dialectical hatred against whites.' Many of those companies reportedly resumed running their ads on the platform in 2024 but spending significantly less. The companies, including Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, Lionsgate and Comcast (NBC News' parent company) did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
This week, NBC News contacted 31 companies that had reportedly purchased ads on the platform in the last several years, including major businesses like Temu, Robinhood, Shein, Dell, Waymo, Samsung, the NFL, Amazon, Microsoft, the NBA and Apple, and asked whether they had plans to pause their ads. Most did not respond or declined to comment.
But even if no public statements have been made, there are some indications that advertisers are slowing their business with X behind the scenes.
A person familiar with the company DraftKings, which was labeled as one of the platform's top ad spenders in early 2025, said the company was addressing the matter internally. Amazon declined to comment.
Red Deer Games, another company that had been listed as a top ad spender, said it did not have any ads running on the platform at the moment but did not specify since when or why it chose to do so.
Advertising industry experts told NBC News that companies are spending on the platform far below what they did before Musk took over. They said they are unlikely to return any time soon, even if they remain silent about Grok's antisemitic posts.
Some major brands did continue advertising on X under Musk but in amounts far smaller than in previous years, said Brett House, the senior vice president of MediaRadar, a firm that tracks digital advertising spending.
'The brands that had already left the platform or radically reduced spending are not coming back or not going to increase spend,' House told NBC News. 'It's more effective to spend on places like TikTok.'
In an analysis, MediaRadar said it estimated consistent declines in year-over-year X ad revenue for the last 18 months.
'You're not going to come back unless there's real turnaround and change within the organization,' House said.
Meanwhile, Musk said Wednesday that Grok's antisemitism was 'being addressed,' and the chatbot has not expressed overt bigotry since. A company spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.
Grok is a sophisticated large language model, or LLM, like OpenAI's ChatGPT. It adopted such an overtly antisemitic personality days after Musk, frustrated by the model's tendency to correct false right-wing claims, announced an overhaul. Grok is trained in part on users' posts on X, which often include hate speech and white nationalist content.
Despite the antisemitic posting scandal, Musk and his companies are pushing ahead with the technology, debuting Grok 4 on Wednesday evening, along with the new $300-per-month SuperGrok Heavy subscription plan. Musk declared Thursday that the AI would somehow be integrated into vehicles produced by Tesla 'next week at the latest.'
Musk has taken remarkable steps against advertisers who have tried to jump ship.
Last year, X sued some advertisers for pulling off the platform after Musk acquired it. It broadened the suit this year to include more brands, and the Federal Trade Commission began asking companies last month about their decisions to boycott X, The Wall Street Journal has reported. The FTC did not respond to a request for comment.
In 2023, Musk lashed out at advertisers threatening to pull ad dollars from the platform. At the 2023 DealBook summit, when he was asked about the threats, Musk said: 'If somebody's going to try to blackmail me with advertising? Blackmail me with money? Go f--- yourself. Go. F---. Yourself. Is that clear?' He singled out Disney's Bob Iger, saying, "Hi Bob!" Musk later tried to walk back the statements, saying they were not meant to be aimed at the ad industry as a whole.
Musk's tense relationship with advertisers highlights another factor that could influence advertising on the platform — the departure of Yaccarino, who is widely admired in the advertising industry. She did not address whether the Grok episode played a role in her decision, but a person familiar with the situation told NBC News her resignation had been in the works for over a week.
Lou Paskalis, the chief strategy officer at Ad Fontes Media, told NBC News that he believed Yaccarino kept brands' exodus from X from being worse but that ultimately the platform is not in a position to get major brands to spend significant money.
'Linda was very successful in getting advertisers who had moved off the platform back to X, much more so than probably any other person could have done,' he said. 'I think Elon and his ilk would say, 'Well, she failed to get the spending levels back to where they were from these big advertisers,' and that's just naive.'
'I think advertisers will slowly draw down now. Nobody wants to be named in a lawsuit,' Paskalis said.