Elon Musk says Twitter advertisers are coming back

Billionaire also says artificial intelligence will be ‘probably the most disruptive technology ever’.

Elon Musk says Twitter is winning back nearly all of the advertisers who left since his takeover of the social media company last year, adding his goal for the platform was to “make it a positive force for civilisation”.

Speaking before an at times raucous audience at a tech conference in the French capital on Saturday (AEST), Mr Musk also gave a vote of confidence in his new Twitter chief executive, Linda Yaccarino, saying that “almost all of the advertisers have said that, they’ve either come back or they said they will come back”.

Ms Yaccarino, who previously led ad sales at NBCUniversal, “understands the concerns that advertisers have and I think will do a great job in addressing those concerns”, said Mr Musk, who bought Twitter last year and leads electric carmaker Tesla and rocket company SpaceX.

Since Mr Musk’s $US44bn Twitter takeover, he has slashed Twitter’s staff in an effort to cut losses, and pledged to make the platform a haven of free speech – a pledge he reiterated in Paris.

But the company suffered an advertiser exodus, with many companies suspending their advertising spending on the platform over fears their ads would appear near hate speech, disinformation or other controversial content.

Mr Musk said Twitter’s approach to brand safety was to make sure advertisers didn’t appear next to controversial content. “If you’re for example, say, Disney and you’re advertising a children’s movie, then you want to have all-ages content,” he said.

Earlier in the day, Mr Musk met with French President Emmanuel Macron, who is courting Tesla to build a large battery factory in France.

Mr Musk, currently the world’s richest person, also had lunch in Paris with the second-richest: Bernard Arnault, head of the LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton luxury empire. The two men have a combined net worth of nearly $US430bn, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

They ate at Plénitude, a restaurant at LVMH’s Cheval Blanc hotel, where a six-course meal starts at 495 euros before wine pairings, along with Mr Musk’s mother and Mr Arnault’s sons Antoine and Alexandre, according to a person familiar with the lunch. Antoine heads communications, image and environment for LVMH, while Alexandre is the No.2 at LVMH-owned luxury jeweller Tiffany.

Later at the tech conference, Antoine Arnault came on stage with other French business executives to ask Mr Musk whether the rise of artificial intelligence would herald the end of the advertising industry. Mr Arnault also cited Tesla’s higher market capitalisation compared with LVMH’s and asked, “How much longer are you going to make us look so bad?”

“Valuations are a strange thing,” Mr Musk responded.

He predicted that AI would be “probably the most disruptive technology ever” and reiterated his concern that developing superhuman AI could have “a potentially catastrophic outcome”, referencing suggestions that such AI could wipe out humanity. He added that he thought such an outcome was less likely but needed to be avoided.

Mr Musk has long been interested in the future of artificial intelligence – both by investing in it and by sounding the alarm about existential dangers he says it may pose. He was one of the founders of OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, before he was pushed out in a power struggle. Earlier this year, he founded a new company, called X.AI, that he said would be a truth-seeking AI model that would one day understand the universe.

“Let’s say that there is some AI Armageddon that happened, some sort of AI apocalypse. I think I would still want to be alive at this time to see it,” Mr Musk said. Before adding tentatively: “Hopefully not cause it.”

The Wall Street Journal