Elon Musk is suing the energy company Ørsted accusing it of having agreed to an illegal boycott of X, according to the platform’s managing director Linda Yaccarino.

On Tuesday (6 August), X filed an anti-trust lawsuit against a list of companies including Ørsted, which allegedly “conspired to boycott X”.

The lawsuit, which was filed in Texas, includes other members of the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) such as CVC Health, Mars and Unilever as well as the trade group behind GARM, the World Federation of Advertisers.

It said that the boycott was leading to “billions of dollars in advertising revenue” loss for X and that the defendants acted against their own economic self-interests in a conspiracy against the platform that violated US antitrust law.

In her post on X, Yaccarino added that “no small group of people should be able to monopolise what gets monetised. This group is no match for the power of our users.”

The World Federation of Advertisers launched the GARM initiative in 2019 to “help the industry address the challenge of illegal or harmful content on digital media platforms and its monetization via advertising”.

Christine Bartholomew, an antitrust expert and professor at the University of Buffalo’s law school, told Reuters that it will be difficult for X to prove that this is an unlawful boycott. The social media platform will have to prove that each advertiser joined an actual agreement to boycott.

“Proving this requirement is no small hurdle” in cases where an agreement might be implicit, she said.

In other news, Ørsted piloted a new technology at its Gode Wind 3 offshore wind farm in Germany, Power Technology reported last month.

The new technique used at the wind farm reduces underwater noise leading to fewer environmental disturbances. The patented jetting technology was tested on three monopiles at the 242MW Gode Wind 3 site.