This Wall Street Journal, report (Apple News+) by Suzanne Vranica, Dana Mattioli, and Jessica Toonkel directly accuses Elon Musk and X/Twitter’s CEO Linda Yaccarino of engaging in an “advertise or be sued” scheme:

Late last year, Verizon Communications got an unusual message from a media company that wanted its business: Spend your ad dollars with us or we’ll see you in court.

The threat came from X, the social-media platform that has been struggling to resuscitate its ad business after many corporate advertisers fled over concerns about loosened content-moderation standards following Elon Musk’s $44 billion purchase in late 2022.

It worked. Verizon, which hadn’t advertised on X since 2022, pledged to spend at least $10 million this year on the platform, a person familiar with the matter said.

Fashion company Ralph Lauren also agreed to resume buying ads on X after receiving a lawsuit threat, people familiar with the matter said. All told, at least six companies that had either received lawsuit threats or were motivated in part by pressure tactics have struck ad deals with X, according to people familiar with the negotiations. The agreements include both firm ad-spending commitments and nonbinding targets.

The legal threats are part of an extraordinary pressure campaign that Musk and X CEO Linda Yaccarino launched to boost revenue by cajoling advertisers—including Amazon, Unilever, Pinterest and Lego—to spend money on their platform.

Normal people might call that “extortion.” That word is nowhere to be found here—but how can we not draw that conclusion?

In a functioning democracy, such baldfaced attempts at a shakedown would be laughed at by everyone, from the CEOs to the judges, and some Attorney General would be gleefully making their bones prosecuting Musk, Yaccarino, and anyone else at X/Twitter involved in this advertise-or-be-sued scheme.

We are clearly not in a functioning democracy.

This use of lawsuits to coerce money or obedience is straight out of Donald Trump’s playbook. It’s effective only because of the massive financial and political clout they wield. Without either, they’re little more than weak, petulant whiners.

I mean, weaker, more petulant whiners.

The lawsuits the WSJ references aren’t new, nor are the accusations; in February, after Apple resumed advertising on X/Twitter, I wrote (under the still-too-soft headline After a Year-Long Pause, Apple Resumes Advertising on the Anti-Democracy, Nazi-Supporting X/Twitter):

This latest act of acquiescence is clearly meant to curry favor with Trump and co-President Musk^[1] out of fear of retaliation—especially from Musk, who’s actively suing companies who stopped advertising on X/Twitter^[2]. No doubt Cook and Co. are hoping to avoid that, making the resumption of ads a bribe to Musk—or, if you’d like to be more generous to Apple, a payoff coerced through blackmail and extortion.

Worth remembering: in 2023, Musk told advertisers to “go fuck yourself” at The New York Times Dealbook Summit:

Don’t advertise. If someone is going to try and blackmail me with advertising? Blackmail me with money? Go fuck yourself. Go fuck yourself, is that clear?

It was. They stopped. So he decided he’d do the “blackmailing with money.”