A US federal judge has dismissed Elon Musk’s antitrust lawsuit against advertisers who pulled their spending from X, ruling that the company failed to state a valid legal claim and barring it from ever refiling the case. US District Judge Jane Boyle, presiding in Dallas, dismissed the suit with prejudice on Thursday and denied X the right to appeal, delivering about as complete a legal defeat as a plaintiff can receive.
The lawsuit, filed by X Corp in August 2024 and expanded in February 2025, accused the World Federation of Advertisers, its now-defunct Global Alliance for Responsible Media initiative, and more than a dozen major companies including Mars, Unilever, CVS Health, Nestlé, Colgate-Palmolive, Lego, Shell, Tyson Foods, Abbott Laboratories, and Pinterest of conspiring to withhold “billions of dollars” in advertising revenue from the platform. X argued that the companies’ coordinated use of GARM’s brand safety standards amounted to an illegal boycott under US antitrust law.
Judge Boyle disagreed on every count. GARM, she wrote, “did not buy advertising space from X to sell to advertisers nor did it, in such an arrangement, tell X not to sell directly to Garm’s customers.” The alleged conspiracy, in other words, was not a conspiracy at all. Companies decided independently where to spend their advertising budgets, and choosing not to advertise on X is not an antitrust violation. It is a business decision.
The cost of the lawsuit
The legal defeat is the final chapter in a confrontation that accomplished remarkably little for X and caused considerable collateral damage to the advertising industry. GARM, the brand safety initiative at the centre of the lawsuit, shut down in August 2024, weeks after X filed its complaint. The World Federation of Advertisers said the legal action had “drained its resources and finances,” even though the case had not yet been adjudicated. A voluntary industry body created to help advertisers avoid placing their brands alongside illegal or harmful content was effectively destroyed by the act of being sued, regardless of the lawsuit’s merits.
The companies X targeted are among the world’s largest advertisers. Their decision to reduce spending on the platform was not, by any available evidence, coordinated through GARM or any other mechanism. It followed a series of decisions by Musk that made X a riskier environment for brand advertising: he reinstated accounts that had been suspended for policy violations, relaxed content moderation, disbanded internal safety teams, and pursued a public persona that many corporate marketing departments found incompatible with their brands. Advertisers responded the way advertisers have always responded to perceived reputational risk. They left.
Where the money went, and where it did not come back
The financial trajectory tells the story plainly. Twitter generated approximately $4.5 billion in advertising revenue in 2022, the year Musk acquired it. By 2023, that figure had fallen to roughly $2.2 billion, a decline of more than half. Revenue recovered modestly to approximately $2.6 billion in 2024 and $2.9 billion in 2025, the first year of growth since the acquisition. But even at that improved level, X’s revenue remains roughly 35 per cent below what the platform earned before Musk took over.
The partial recovery suggests that some advertisers returned, drawn by lower rates, video advertising inventory, and the platform’s continued reach among news-oriented audiences. But the largest brand advertisers, the companies that accounted for the bulk of Twitter’s premium advertising revenue, have largely not come back. UK filings published in January 2026 showed X’s UK revenue fell 58 per cent during the period, a steeper decline than the global average.
The lawsuit was, among other things, an attempt to use the legal system to compel spending that the market would not provide voluntarily. Judge Boyle’s ruling confirmed what the advertising industry had argued from the start: companies have no legal obligation to buy advertising on any particular platform, and declining to do so is not an act of anticompetitive conspiracy.
The strategic context
The dismissal arrives at a sensitive moment for Musk’s corporate empire. X was acquired by xAI in March 2025 and subsequently folded into SpaceX when SpaceX acquired xAI in February 2026. SpaceX is now preparing for a potential IPO in mid-2026 that could target a $1.75 trillion valuation. X’s advertising business, while a small fraction of the combined entity’s value, is a visible and politically charged liability. A pending antitrust lawsuit against some of the world’s largest companies would have complicated the IPO roadmap. Its dismissal with prejudice removes that specific risk, though it does so by confirming that the lawsuit should never have been filed.
Musk’s declaration when the suit was filed in 2024, “We tried being nice for 2 years and got nothing but empty words. Now, it is war,” now reads as a miscalculation rather than a strategic pivot. The war lasted 19 months. It destroyed GARM, alienated the advertisers X was trying to win back, generated legal costs for all parties, and ended in a ruling that X’s claims did not constitute a valid antitrust complaint. The companies Musk sued can now point to a federal court’s finding that their decisions to reduce spending were lawful and independent, which is not the outcome that makes a sales call to their media buying teams any easier.
X’s advertising problem was never legal. It was reputational, editorial, and strategic. The platform’s owner made choices about content moderation, political positioning, and public conduct that a significant portion of the advertising market found unacceptable. The appropriate response to that problem was to change the product, the policy, or the pitch. Suing the customers was not among the viable options, and the court has now confirmed as much.
Stephan is the sports journalist for the Maple Grove Report.
