Former CNN anchor Don Lemon is suing his former employer Elon Musk after Musk killed Lemon’s talk show after a conflicting interview between the two.
Musk announced in January that Lemon would host a show on X. At the time, the platform was home to popular right-wing shows hosted by Tucker Carlson, Ben Shapiro and Alex Jones. Musk promoted the former CNN anchor as a show to demonstrate his allegiance to the idea of ​​”impartiality.” Musk said The Don Lemon Show would prove that “the digital street corner belongs to everyone,” meaning X was a place for all ideologies.
But to open the show, Lemon made the fateful decision to broadcast a recorded, hour-long, unedited interview with Musk himself, a decision that quickly led to the show’s cancellation.
Now Lemon is suing both Musk and X, claiming he was misled into a business deal with the platform under “false pretenses.” The suit accuses X executives and Musk of making “false promises and representations” to Lemon, and claims that while Lemon was told he would be entering into a lucrative, long-term business relationship, the real “purpose” of the partnership was to temporarily use Lemon’s “name, likeness, reputation and identity” to salvage the defendants’ reputations and attract advertisers to the X platform. The suit notes that X experienced a steep decline in advertising revenues just prior to the deal.
Lemon says he was promised “full authority and control over any productions he produced, even if Defendants didn’t like it.” But after Lemon spent hundreds of thousands of dollars setting up a company, hiring staff and securing production space for the show, Musk canceled the show, texting Lemon’s lawyer just one day after the ill-fated interview that “the contract was canceled,” the lawsuit alleges.
Given Musk’s mercurial nature, it’s not surprising that the interview didn’t go well. Lemon pulled no punches, grilling the tech mogul with question after question about everything from trans rights to Musk’s hostile relationship with X’s advertisers, the rise of hate speech on the platform, and the billionaire’s own drug use. At one point, hamstrung by the constant criticism, Musk turned to a claim made in Walter Isaacson’s biography that his “tough childhood” helped explain why he’s such an “intense person” (perhaps the phrase was Lemon’s euphemism for “asshole”).
Lemon’s show was canceled just the next day. “Apparently, free speech absolutism doesn’t apply when it comes to someone like me asking questions about him,” the former news anchor said in a video he posted to X shortly after his contract was terminated.
While Lemon continues to produce shows and promote some of them on X, the franchise would clearly have been more profitable had his deal with the platform continued. The suit alleges that X offered to pay Lemon $1.5 million per year, during which Lemon was obligated to produce one piece of “long-form” content per week and 10 pieces of short-form content per month. Additionally, Lemon was entitled to “60% of the gross advertising revenues received by X for programmatic advertising generated by his content.”
The lawsuit alleges that X’s management ultimately “falsely alleged breach of the partnership agreement and failed to compensate him.” The lawsuit now seeks economic damages, punitive damages, and compensation for attorneys’ fees.
Gizmodo has reached out to Musk via X and will update this article if we hear back.
