X’s business problem isn’t that brands are fleeing due to Elon controversy. Its business problem is that its ads product stinks at direct response marketing and brand marketing (what it offers) is elective. TikTok is essentially owned and operated by the CCP, yet brands still choose to spend billions of dollars on it because it has a decent DR ads product. I say decent because it’s not nearly as good as Meta, but brands are so desperate for a secondary DR channel that they’ll spend dollars on TT’s merely decent ads product. The threshold for X’s ad product is decent. And they’ve, to date, failed to meet that threshold. At decent levels of performance, they no longer are “elective.” I think the unspoken promise of Elon’s ownership of X is that they’d finally get good at ads — throw a bunch of world class AI engineers at ad targeting and solve it — I mean the guy can land rockets, surely he can target ads better. But they’ve made like zero progress on this. I think there’s a higher likelihood of Elon solving X’s ad product issues than there is at Elon solving the “mind virus” (in his view) of woke brands. He should focus on the former and the latter will follow. If brands like Disney and Apple actually found X’s ads product beneficial and not merely a place they have to spend, then they’d be way less likely to pull those dollars and, in Elon’s terms, blackmail him when he says things they don’t like.