General Motors said it had temporarily suspended paid advertising on Twitter after Tesla CEO Elon Musk made the social media acquisition for $44 billion.
General Motors is one of the largest auto manufacturers in the US, which is a rival to Tesla.
“engaging with Twitter to understand the direction of the platform under their new ownership.” GM said
GM said “as is normal course of business with a significant change in a media platform, we have temporarily paused our paid advertising.” The Detroit automaker added its “customer care interactions on Twitter will continue.”
In the second quarter of this year, ads gave Twitter 90 percent of their revenue. It’s unclear how much of GM’s total advertising budget is dedicated to Twitter.
Most auto manufacturers have accounts on Twitter to interact with the public. Although not all of them allocate money for paid advertising.
Ford, GM, Stellantis, BMW, Porsche, VW and Volvo are a handful of established car manufacturers that have social media accounts on the platform. Electric vehicle startups such as Rivian, Faraday, Lucid also have accounts on Twitter. Fisker still has an account on Twitter although CEO Henrik Fisker deleted his personal account in April following the announcement of the Musk-Twitter deal.
Musk tried to assuage advertisers’ concerns with a note posted on his personal Twitter account about his intended approach to running the social media platform.
“There’s been a lot of speculation about why I bought Twitter and what I thought about advertising,” Musk wrote. “Mostly wrong.” He went on to write that he believes Twitter has the potential to become a “public digital city square,” and that the platform cannot be a “free-for-all hell scene.”
Musk tweeted on Friday that Twitter would form a content moderation board “with very diverse viewpoints.” Musk said no major content decisions or account recovery would take place before the board convenes.
Dear Twitter Advertisers pic.twitter.com/GMwHmInPAS
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 27, 2022
