Social media platform
In joint documents filed late Thursday in federal courts in Tennessee and Texas, and made public on Friday,
The dueling legal cases began in 2023, when 17 music companies and their trade group, the National Music Publishers Association, sued
That case came just months after Musk, the leader of Tesla and SpaceX, bought Twitter for $44 billion and implemented mass layoffs and major changes to the way the company operated. Musk’s acquisition also abruptly ended two years of negotiations that had been underway between Twitter and the music industry to secure licensing deals that would allow users to freely share copyrighted music on the platform, as they do on Instagram and other sites.
Music publishers represent songwriting and songwriting copyrights, which are separate from recording copyrights.
In January 2026, That, X maintained, prevented him from striking smaller deals with individual publishers.
In his lawsuit, every week related to thousands of publications” that music companies maintained involved infringement of musical works. X also said it had a “robust” copyright law enforcement policy.
In their legal documents, the companies gave no reason for the layoff stipulation and did not mention any agreement. A spokeswoman for the music publishers’ trade group declined to comment. Representatives and attorneys for X did not respond to requests for comment.
