An X executive said Walmart has not advertised on X since October.
Walmart on Friday said it has pulled advertisements from X, joining a list of big advertisers to leave the platform formerly known as Twitter.
“We aren’t advertising on X as we’ve found some other platforms better reach our customers,” Walmart said in a statement.
While Walmart only announced its pullout on Friday, Joe Benarroch, head of operations at X, said the retail giant had already stopped advertising on the platform a while ago.
“Walmart has not advertised on X since October so this is not a recent pause, the company has just been organically connecting with its community of more than one million people on X,” Mr. Benarroch said in a statement.
“Walmart has a wonderful community on X, and with a half a billion people on X, every year the platform experiences 15 billion impressions about the holidays alone with more than 50 percent of X users doing most or all of their shopping online,” he added.
The announcement comes two days after X’s billionaire owner, Elon Musk, lashed out at big advertisers whom he accused of trying to “blackmail” him.
“Don’t advertise,” Mr. Musk said onstage at the DealBook conference when Andrew Ross Sorkin of The New York Times asked him about the recent advertiser exodus.
“You don’t want them to advertise?” Mr. Sorkin said.
“If somebody’s going to try to blackmail me with advertising, blackmail me with money? Go [expletive] yourself,” Mr. Musk replied.
The X owner then waved to the audience and said, “Hey, Bob,” referring to Disney chief executive Bob Iger, who spoke earlier that day at the event.
Mr. Musk nonetheless acknowledged that the loss of advertising revenue could hurt and potentially even “kill” his company. But in that case, he said, history would blame advertisers, not him, for X’s downfall.
“The whole world will know that those advertisers killed the company, and we will document it in great detail,” he told Mr. Sorkin.
Mr. Musk also apologized for endorsing a post he had described as “the actual truth,” in which an X user said that Jews in the Western world are experiencing the same kind of “dialectical hatred” they purportedly helped spread against white people.
By Bill Pan
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