Elon Musk says former X advertisers may have violated the RICO Act. Here’s what a RICO lawyer thinks.

• Portal X owner Elon Musk has claimed that advertisers may have violated the RICO Act by refusing to advertise on Portal X.

• At the same time, X filed an antitrust lawsuit against a group of advertisers.

• The lawyer said that despite Musk’s allegations, there is no basis for a RICO complaint.

Elon Musk’s relationship with advertisers has reached a new low.

Musk’s X filed an antitrust lawsuit against advertisers last week, accusing them of illegally boycotting the platform in order to “collectively withhold billions of dollars in advertising revenue.”

Then, in the X post, Musk encouraged companies that were “systematically boycotted by advertisers” to sue, claiming there could be “criminal liability under the RICO Act.”

RICO is a federal law that covers crimes such as fraud, robbery, bribery, gambling, extortion, and arson. It stands for Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act and was originally designed to combat the Mafia.

Jeffrey Grell, a RICO attorney, told Business Insider that RICO only applies to illegal acts, and that’s not the case here. “You have no right to do business with anyone,” he said.

He added that there is “no reason whatsoever” why lawyers should not file a civil lawsuit if they believe they have grounds to do so.

“I think Musk is trying to gain some PR on RICO by not filing a RICO lawsuit here,” Grell said. “If his lawyers thought he had a civil RICO claim, they likely would have included it in the lawsuit they filed.”

Musk took over Twitter, which he later renamed X, in October 2022. Musk quickly removed features that moderated inflammatory speech and misinformation. Within a year, X’s top advertisers stopped buying space on the platform, fearing their products and services would be associated with questionable content.

Advertising is a key element of social networking site profits.

While Musk has hailed himself as a defender of free speech, he has been accused of promoting anti-Semitism on X, which hasn’t helped his standing with advertisers. And when asked what he would do about hateful content, he publicly told advertisers who pulled out, “go fuck yourself.” His attempts to get them back have not yielded any results yet. And now he is suing them.

The antitrust lawsuit filed by X named the Global Alliance for Responsible Media and the World Federation of Advertisers as defendants, along with its members CVS Health, Unilever, Mars, and Ørsted. After the lawsuit was filed, GARM announced it would fight the lawsuit but would also cease operations.

X argues in his lawsuit that advertisers “acted in parallel to discontinue purchasing ads on Twitter, which represented a clear departure from their prior purchasing pattern.”

But operating in parallel with others is not a crime, Grell said, comparing it to a situation where gas stations watch each other’s prices and adjust them without talking to each other.

Similarly, Grell said advertisers might see competitors pulling ads from Musk’s X and think, “I’m getting off Twitter. I don’t want to be blacklisted if I advertise on a platform that’s being canceled.”

“It’s just parallel behavior,” he said.

Read the original article on Business Insider