New York-CNN
Don Lemon on Thursday filed a lawsuit against Elon Musk and X after the erratic billionaire canceled a planned partnership that would have seen the former CNN anchor create a talk show on the embattled social media platform.
Musk abruptly canceled the well-publicized deal with Lemon earlier this year after he became visibly annoyed during an interview with the journalist for the first episode of “The Don Lemon Show.”
Lemon’s lawsuit, filed in a San Francisco court, alleged that Musk and X induced him “through false promises and representations” to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars to create the web based show, only to pull the rug from under him.
Lemon alleged that Musk wanted to announce a partnership with him only to trade off his name to rehabilitate his social media company’s troubled image. Since Musk took over X, advertisers have fled, choosing not to associate their brands with the toxic content on the platform, some of which emanates directly from the billionaire owner himself.
“This case is straightforward,” Carney Shegerian, an attorney for Lemon, said in a statement. “X executives used Don to prop up their advertising sales pitch, then canceled their partnership and dragged Don’s name through the mud. You don’t have to be a genius to see the fraud, negligence, and reputational damage here.”
A representative for X did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the lawsuit, but the company previously defended scrapping its deal with Lemon, stating “we reserve the right to make decisions about our business partnerships, and after careful consideration, X decided not to enter into a commercial partnership with the show.”
The lawsuit alleges that Musk, in addition to X chief executive Linda Yaccarino, promised Lemon a $1.5 million deal and added revenue sharing incentive to post his content on the platform 24 hours before uploading it elsewhere.
Lemon alleged in the lawsuit that he was skeptical of striking a deal with Musk, given his unhinged public behavior, but that he was eventually won over by Yaccarino, who assured him that he would have the platform’s full support. In their attempts to recruit him, Yaccarino and Brett Weitz, head of talent at X, attended a lunch in New York City with Lemon in which they conveyed Lemon would have the company’s backing, the lawsuit said.
But the deal quickly collapsed after Musk grew angry at Lemon’s questioning during a sit-down interview in March taped at his Tesla headquarters in Texas. During the interview, Lemon pressed Musk about the rise of hate speech on X, in addition to his open use of the prescription drug ketamine.
