Elon Musk has made good on his promise to file a “thermonuclear lawsuit” against Media Matters for America after the non-profit accused the platform of allowing antisemitic posts next to ads.

The billionaire owner of X filed a lawsuit Monday against the media watchdog following news that Apple, Disney, and IBM pulled ads from the social media platform after the media watchdog found they were being placed next to content praising Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party.

The lawsuit from X refutes the company’s findings, stating that Media Matters “knowingly and maliciously” manufactured side-by-side images depicting advertisers' posts on X Corp's social media platform beside Neo-Nazi and white-nationalist fringe content and then “portrayed these manufactured images as if they were what typical X users experience on the platform.”

The court filing went on to allege that Media Matters designed both these images and its resulting media strategy to drive advertisers from the platform and “destroy X Corp."

The row began in a week where Musk agreed with a post on X endorsing the ‘replacement theory’, an antisemitic, far-right conspiracy theory that falsely claims Jewish people are trying to replace white people with non-white immigrants to carry out a ‘white genocide’.

Musk responded to the post, which suggested that Jewish people are driving hate against white people, by saying that its content was “the actual truth”.

The current challenges for X likely stem from Musk’s decision upon buying the platform for around $44 billion in late 2022 to reverse bans of controversial user accounts including white nationalists, antisemites, and Islamophobes.

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