The bank says that Tesla breached a contract related to stock warrants it held after Musk tweeted in 2018 that he had "funding secured" to take Tesla private. The barrage of bad ratings was inspired by Musk's comments to The Wall Street Journal that day about the lawsuit.
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"If JPM doesn't withdraw their lawsuit, I will give them a one star review on Yelp," the CEO told the Journal. "This is my final warning!"
By Tuesday morning, JPMorgan's Yelp page had dozens of negative reviews, including:
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"JP Morgan Sucks from a Tesla owner."
"That's what you get for playing with Elon."
"They got my order wrong. I wanted curly fries."
"One star only for their frivolous lawsuits against their business partners, particularly against Tesla."
"I'm here for Tesla obviously. Giving u one star for suing the company."
A few Tesla-related ratings slipped past Yelp's defenses into the recommended reviews. Later Tuesday, posting new reviews of the bank was disabled, Yelp said.
"Yelp's mission is to connect consumers with great local businesses by giving them access to reliable and useful information," a company spokesperson said in a statement. "Consumer trust is our top priority, which is why we take significant measures to maintain the integrity and quality of the content on our site. Yelp invests in both technology and human moderation to mitigate misinformation on our platform. Our approach is driven by our automated recommendation software, reporting by Yelp's community of business owners and users, human moderation, and Consumer Alerts. In fact, economists, academics, industry pundits, the media, and regulators have shown that Yelp is one of the most aggressive and successful at identifying and weeding out unreliable reviews."
Musk hasn't spoken publicly about the review bombing but responded to a tweet parodying a one-star Yelp review of JPMorgan that says, "Used to come here. Service has degraded. Place is just living off its name. Doesn't accept DOGE." The Twitter user captioned the image, "Elon's Yelp review of JPMorgan is lit."
"We have provided Tesla multiple opportunities to fulfill its contractual obligations, so it is unfortunate that they have forced this issue into litigation," JPMorgan told the Wall Street Journal of its suit.
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