Wall Street Journal: Senators Call for DOJ Probe of X’s Advertiser Pressure Campaign

Five Democratic senators have asked the Justice Department to investigate whether Elon Musk is leveraging his influence in the Trump administration to bully advertisers into returning to X.

The request, from Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, Richard Blumenthal, Adam Schiff and Chris Van Hollen, follows a Wall Street Journal report last month about the social-media platform’s pressuring Interpublic Group to spend more on X.

If Musk uses his government position to harm those who don’t do business with him, “he risks running afoul of criminal ethics laws,” the senators wrote to Attorney General Pam Bondi in a letter, a copy of which was viewed by the Journal.

The senators wrote that they are concerned X is taking advantage of Musk’s powerful role to “extract revenue from advertisers.”