Elon Musk, Who Is “Against Anti-Semitism of Any Kind,” Is Now Threatening to Sue the ADL

X owner Elon Musk has settled on a new scapegoat for his failures as the site’s owner: the Anti-Defamation League. Instead of owning up to his own haphazard managerial choices, Musk on Monday threatened to sue the Jewish nonprofit for reporting on antisemitic content that has ran rampant on the platform under his watch. “Since the acquisition,” the billionaire wrote in a post, “The @ADL has been trying to kill this platform by falsely accusing it & me of being anti-Semitic.” 

“Our US advertising revenue is still down 60%, primarily due to pressure on advertisers by @ADL (that’s what advertisers tell us), so they almost succeeded in killing X/Twitter!” he claimed, later adding that he would have no choice but to “clear our platform’s name on the matter of anti-Semitism” by filing a defamation suit against the ADL. 

Though the ADL has said that it does not comment on legal threats, it has noted that the organization met last week with X chief executive Linda Yaccarino. The meeting appears to have gone well—at least according to remarks Yaccarino shared before Musk’s outburst. “A strong and productive partnership is built on good intentions and candor,” Yaccarino wrote in a Wednesday post, thanking ADL national director Jonathan Greenblatt for the meeting. 

Greenblatt, meanwhile, has since deleted his own post calling their meeting “productive.” Moreover, an ADL spokesperson accused Musk of promoting a campaign to “ban” the organization, according to CNN. “ADL is unsurprised yet undeterred that antisemites, white supremacists, conspiracy theorists, and other trolls have launched a coordinated attack on our organization,” said the spokesperson, referencing the “#BanTheADL” campaign that trended on X last week. “This type of thing is nothing new.”

Musk is already engaged in a lawsuit against the Center for Countering Digital Hate. A British nonprofit, the CCDH investigates hate speech diffused through social media platforms; it claims that “hate and disinformation have skyrocketed on [X] since Elon Musk took over the platform.” (Musk has maintained that such an assertion—logged in reports from both the CCDH and the ADL—is “utterly false.”) The civil complaint filed by X accuses the CCDH of conspiring to compromise X’s relationship with advertisers. It also alleges that the CCDH’s data-accumulation methods violated federal hacking laws and X’s terms of service. The CCDH has vowed to fight the suit and continue holding X’s “feet to the fire.”

While a number of legal experts have described the suit as far-fetched, Musk appears insistent on executing a similar maneuver against the ADL. “Document discovery of all communications between The ADL and advertisers will tell the full story,” he wrote Monday. It is, of course, difficult to envision a future wherein X would win back advertisers by dragging them through a laborious discovery process. Not to mention: X’s own internal policies, enforcement, and views regarding hate speech would also presumably come to light, making the threatened suit risky for a company that has suffered nonstop reputational damage since Musk acquired it nearly a year ago.