Elon Musk’s X/Twitter published – and swiftly deleted – an advert that briefly showcased a post criticising the tech mogul for blaming the platform’s financial woes on Jewish people.

The two-minutes advert, released on Thursday to promote the company’s positioning of itself as a “global town square”, opens with a shot of a fast-moving stream of user posts – one of which takes Musk to task for remarks he has made.

https://x.com/molly0xFFF/status/1704884381691629756?s=20

The post, visible for a fraction of a second, was published earlier this month by a popular left-leaning account that pillories right-wing figures, Right Wing Cope, and was shared in response to an earlier statement from Musk attacking the Anti-Defamation League, which fights antisemitism.

It read: “Twitter’s value has fallen by at least 50%, and Elon is blaming it all on the Jews. Masterful gambit sir.”

Musk, in turn, had been responding to a user who shared a screenshot of a headline from a 23-year-old news story about a Denver judge fining the ADL $10.5m in a defamation case. 

The billionaire X owner replied: “Interesting. In our case, they would potentially be on the hook for destroying half the value of the company, so roughly $22 billion.”

This remark was part of a series of posts in which Musk threatened to sue the ADL following a slump in his company’s revenue and engaged with white nationalists and self-proclaimed antisemites criticising the organisation.

Musk recently started targeting the US antisemitism watchdog, accusing it of causing his company massive financial losses since he purchased it last year. This is because, he has claimed, the group has persuaded advertisers to pause spending on the platform after he acquired it and changed its freedom of speech policies.

The watered-down hate speech policy means that X merely limits the visibility of posts that contain such content rather than removing them entirely.

In one post, Musk said: “Our US advertising revenue is still down 60%. Primarily due to pressure on advertisers by @ADL (that’s what advertisers tell us), so they almost succeeded in killing X/Twitter!”

The advert featuring the post critical of Musk was removed from X hours after its release. It was replaced with a new version, with that particular post omitted.

Musk has insisted he is “pro free speech, but against anti-Semitism of any kind”.