General Motors is “pausing” all paid advertising on Twitter after Elon Musk completed his $44 billion USD acquisition of the social network and assumed corporate control on Thursday — reports CNBC.
The veteran automaker told the outlet that it will maintain a presence on the platform and continue to interact with customers as it evaluates Twitter’s direction under its new ownership. GM and Musk are competitors in the automotive space, with the former trying to catch up to Musk’s Tesla in the electric vehicle (EV) race.
“We are engaging with Twitter to understand the direction of the platform under their new ownership,” the company said in a statement. “As is normal course of business with a significant change in a media platform, we have temporarily paused our paid advertising. Our customer care interactions on Twitter will continue.”
Fellow Tesla rival Ford told CNBC that it is not currently paying for advertising on Twitter — and was not doing so before Musk announced his take-private offer for Twitter earlier this year, either. However, CNBC was able to dig up a “promoted” tweet from Ford CEO Jim Farley. Twitter charges users to promote their tweets, which are served to large audiences like ads.
Ford said it “will continue to evaluate the direction of the platform under the new ownership” but will keep engaging with its customers.
Musk is a self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist” who has made clear his intentions to disrupt Twitter’s status quo. He is expected to do away with permanent bans on the platform and loosen content moderation standards.
In an open letter to Twitter’s advertising partners on Thursday, Musk said he obviously doesn’t want Twitter to become “a free-for-all hellscape.” On Friday, the eccentric billionaire announced plans for a “content moderation council” that will ultimately be the ruling authority on content decisions.
Dear Twitter Advertisers pic.twitter.com/GMwHmInPAS
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 27, 2022
Previous reports indicated that Musk would slash Twitter’s workforce by 75% after taking over, but he denied having such plans during his visit to Twitter’s headquarters this week. Musk has already purged CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal, and other bigwigs from the company. Earlier this week, Musk also sent Tesla engineers to audit Twitter’s code.
