GM pauses advertising on Twitter after Elon Musk takeover

General Motors has suspended its advertising on Twitter with Elon Musk as the owner of the social media platform.

Musk is also the owner of Tesla, another automobile firm.

The temporary move aims at getting the Detroit-based automaker to know the direction in which Twitter is going.

GM is the first major automaker to make such a change at this stage.

“We are engaging with Twitter to understand the direction of the platform under their new ownership. As is normal course of business with a significant change in a media platform, we have temporarily paused our paid advertising. Our customer care interactions on Twitter will continue,” the company told CNBC.

General Motors is so far the only major automaker to suspend its advertising in light of Musk’s takeover. Other brands, like Citroën for example, had a bit more fun with the news. “Hello to the social media platform owned by one of our competitors,” a tweet from the automaker said.

Other notable automotive names such as Henrik Fisker have gone in the other direction. The well-known designer and CEO of EV startup Fisker Inc didn’t wait to find out if Musk’s bid to buy Twitter would go through or not. He deleted his account the same day that the news broke.

His automotive company remains on the platform. Concern from advertisers is not shocking or new, says Carscoops in a report.

According to another story from the Wall Street Journal, about a dozen brands have asked that their advertising be paused on Twitter.

Elon Musk has addressed advertisers specifically with a long post that ironically didn’t fit on Twitter in normal text form.

In the post he specifically says that “advertising, when done right, can delight, entertain and inform you; it can show you a service or product… that you never knew existed, but is right for you… Low relevancy ads are spam, but highly relevant ads are actually content!”