Major companies, including CVS, Colgate-Palmolive, Mars, and Nestlé, have asked a federal judge in Texas to dismiss a lawsuit filed by Elon Musk’s social media platform X, which accuses them of illegally boycotting the platform after Musk’s 2022 acquisition.
The lawsuit, initially filed in August 2024 and expanded in February 2025, claims the companies, through the World Federation of Advertisers’ (WFA) Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM), conspired to withhold billions in advertising revenue, violating U.S. antitrust laws.
In August 2024, X sued the WFA and four companies—Unilever, Mars, CVS Health, and Ørsted—alleging they coordinated a boycott through GARM to enforce brand safety standards after Musk’s $44 billion Twitter purchase in October 2022. X claimed the boycott cost it billions and made it a “less effective competitor” in digital advertising.
\On February 1, 2025, X amended its complaint, adding Lego, Nestlé, Tyson Foods, Abbott Laboratories, Colgate-Palmolive, Pinterest, and Shell International as defendants, alleging at least 18 GARM members stopped or reduced ad spending on X between November and December 2022.
GARM, launched in 2019 by the WFA, aimed to prevent ads from appearing alongside harmful content like hate speech. X alleges GARM’s public statements, such as an October 2022 letter urging X to uphold brand safety, constituted a “conspiracy” to boycott.
On Wednesday, the defendant companies filed a motion in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas to dismiss X’s lawsuit. The companies assert X failed to prove they acted with a coordinated plan. They argue their decisions to curtail advertising were independent, driven by concerns over X’s content moderation after Musk fired staff and relaxed safety policies.
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