NEW YORK – Mr Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of X, says the advertisers that have stopped spending on the platform due to his endorsement of an anti-Semitic post can “f––” themselves.

“What it’s going to do is it’s going to kill the company, and the whole world will know the advertisers killed the company,” Mr Musk said at the New York Times DealBook conference on Nov 29. “Go f– yourself.”

The post was the “worst and dumbest I’ve ever done”, said Mr Musk, the chief executive officer of Tesla and the world’s richest person. 

Still, if advertisers leave the company, its failure will be their fault, not his – saying they were trying to “blackmail me with money”, he said. “I won’t tapdance” to prove trustworthy, he said.

X, formerly Twitter, has lost more than 60 per cent of its advertisers since Mr Musk took over the company more than a year ago and started loosening its content restrictions. The company still has billions in debt to repay after Mr Musk’s US$44 billion (S$58.5 billion) purchase of the service.

Earlier in November, Mr Musk agreed with a post that said Jewish people hold a “dialectical hatred” of white people. That message has since drawn criticism from the White House as well as several Tesla investors. Major corporate spenders, including Walt Disney and Apple, distanced themselves from the platform formerly known as Twitter. 

Mr Musk called out to “Bob” specifically, referring to Mr Bob Iger, the chief executive officer of Disney.

For the first time since the post spurred a global backlash, Mr Musk apologised for his choice of words. Mr Musk, who flew to Israel to tour areas that were impacted by the Oct 7 Hamas attack alongside Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, said the trip was planned before the advertiser backlash. It was not an “apology tour”, he said. Following his visit, he appeared on stage wearing a dog tag, which has become symbolic of a call for the return of hostages captured by Hamas.

Mr Musk urged people to judge him by his actions rather than his words and brought up two companies he runs as justification. Tesla, he said, made more electric cars than competitors. SpaceX, formally named Space Exploration Technologies, sends more satellites into space than any other company or country.

“Hate me, like me or indifferent. Do you want the best car, or do you not want the best car?” he said. He said he has done “more for the environment than any human”.

Mr Musk also addressed the inordinate amount of power that he wields given his market power in key industries such as cars, space, satellites and social media. The billionaire holds the keys to technological tools that provide him with political clout that world leaders have come to rely on.

“The reason I have these powers isn’t because of anticompetitive actions but because we’ve executed well,” he said.

The billionaire also addressed the debacle at Open AI, the maker of ChatGPT that Mr Musk cofounded. “I have mixed feelings about Sam,” Mr Musk said about CEO Sam Altman, who was recently ousted and reinstated. “The ring of power can corrupt.”

He said the public should know the reason Mr Altman was fired, in case it has to do with some dangers of AI. “I don’t think it was trivial.”

Mr Musk is building a rival, called xAI, using data from X, the social network. BLOOMBERG