Tech billionaire Elon Musk took an embarrassing loss in court on Monday after a federal judge tossed out his lawsuit accusing a disinformation watchdog of attempting to hurt his social media company’s bottom line. 

Judge Charles Breyer agreed to throw out the lawsuit Musk filed against the Center for Countering Digital Hate, in which he alleged the nonprofit organization’s reporting on the rise of hate speech on X, his social platform, was part of a “scare campaign” to deter advertisers from buying ads on the site. 

The opening paragraph of Breyer’s ruling makes clear the judge condemns the premise of Musk’s lawsuit, in which he claimed research shared by the Center for Countering Digital Hate hurt his company’s bottom line. 

He wrote:

The Center for Countering Digital Hate is one of several organizations that’s been attacked by conservatives like Musk and Republican Rep. Jim Jordan, who pushed the false claim that anti-disinformation efforts — by the government, by private organizations, or through some collaboration of the two — amount to anti-conservative censorship. Musk and other conservatives clearly don’t like the idea that their, or their allies’, extremist behavior online might be studied and possibly even regulated in any way. In fact, Musk filed a lawsuit against media watchdog Media Matters that’s virtually identical to his lawsuit against the CCDH. But Judge Breyer’s ruling goes a long way in the effort to highlight the dubiousness of the anti-anti-disinformation crowd's arguments.