For the past few weeks, Elon Musk has been throwing a tantrum — and throwing around legal threats — over Alex Gibney’s “hit piece” documentary about him that’s set to release next month.
Now, as if following his lead, pretty much all of the major social media sites are refusing to run ads for the movie, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
The platforms — YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook — are unwilling to accept paid advertising for the film. And of course so is X, the site owned by Musk himself.
The stonewalling has reportedly taken distributor Bleecker Street by surprise, with the company scrambling to figure out why its ads have been so widely rejected.
YouTube, TikTok, and Facebook and Instagram owner Meta have all provided a reason related to “political content” to the distributor for why they turned down the ad, per the reporting.
This line of reasoning feels specious: although TikTok and Facebook by policy don’t allow political ads, neither the movie nor its trailer are part of a political campaign. It’s an even stranger argument for YouTube, which has no prohibitions on political advertising.
If, as what appears to be happening, the tech industry is closing ranks around one of its own, it would be an astonishing testament to Musk’s influence and would represent an ominous threat to free speech. The film requires advertising to reach an audience, and if major social media platforms can collude to ice out works that criticize figures in their industry, it makes it so that there’s not only less of an audience seeing these critiques, but that producing these critical works is financially unsustainable.
The nearly four-hour film, titled “Musk,” is a comprehensive and critical look at the billionaire’s life, beginning with his upbringing in South Africa and running through his success as a tech entrepreneur and his rise as a major and polarizing political figure.
Musk has been raging against the film since it was first announced in 2023, calling it a “hit piece,” even though there were barely any details about it at the time. In the past month, he’s ramped up his attacks against the documentary, calling Gibney a “douchebag” and accusing him of being “incredibly biased.”
He also, via his lawyer Alex Spiro, threatened to sue Gibney’s production company Jigsaw Productions for defamation. This claim centers on how the documentary supposedly promotes a debunked conspiracy theory that Musk used his Starlink satellites to help Donald Trump secure votes in the 2024 presidential election.
Bleecker Street has appealed to the social media sites over the rejected trailer ads. YouTube and TikTok are still considering the appeal, while Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, has already rejected them.
Musk has a lengthy track record of silencing his critics. After taking over X, formerly Twitter, he spuriously banned journalists that were critical of him, and he’s often resorted to using hush money to keep a bad word from being spoken about him.
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