A few weeks ago, I was having lunch with a former magazine editor in New York when the subject of Elon Musk and Twitter came up. We talked about the advertisers spooked by Musk’s disastrous rollout of the Twitter Blue subscription service, among other things. 

“Oh, they’ll come back,” he said. “They always do.”

Now, we all know how bad the deterioration of Twitter’s business has been, thanks to an excellent scoop today from Erin about the meeting where the company laid out all the details to employees. And while I think my lunchmate was right on some level (advertisers do come and go—and come again), the more than 500 top advertisers that have paused spending aren’t just doing so to register their disapproval of how Musk is running the company.