Elon Musk’s attempts to win over advertisers have yet to spark a major recovery in ad revenue for X.
In 2025, ad revenue for X (formerly Twitter) reached $1.8 billion, up around 7% from 2024. That said, revenue was down 21% from 2023 and about 59% from 2021, the year before Musk took over Twitter and began alienating some brands with looser content moderation.
Here were the stats:
X’s ad revenue figures were revealed in an S-1 filing by SpaceX, X’s parent company.
Since buying Twitter, Musk’s relationship with advertisers has been rocky.
In 2023, he told marketers who were skipping out on X ads that they could “go fuck yourself.”
Musk hired an ad industry veteran, Linda Yaccarino, in 2023 to help woo marketers. Yaccarino previously ran ad sales at NBCUniversal.
The drama with the ad industry didn’t stop, though.
A year later, X sued an advertising trade group, The World Federation of Advertisers, and some members, including CVS, Unilever, and Mars, alleging they violated antitrust law by collectively withholding ad spend. A judge later tossed out the suit, citing a lack of jurisdiction and X’s failure to state a claim under the antitrust laws.
Yaccarino left the company in July 2025.
Last year, there was industry chatter that Musk’s entry into politics may have helped X’s ad prospects. As Musk took on a high-profile role in the US government, some advertisers began spending on X again. Ad industry insiders previously told Business Insider that they felt buying ads on the app had become a cost of doing business to appease Musk and his allies in President Donald Trump’s White House. Musk left his role, and his relationship with the Trump administration has since become more muddled.
Advertising’s centrality as a revenue source for X diminished in March 2025 after Musk decided to merge the app into his artificial intelligence company, xAI. The company’s AI revenue is growing much faster than its advertising revenue, reaching around $1.35 billion in 2025, a 52% increase from the previous year.
With the decision to merge xAI into SpaceX earlier this year, advertising now accounts for just a fraction of the combined company’s $18.7 billion in 2025 revenue.
That doesn’t mean X has stopped trying to improve its ad products.
Last month, X announced it had revamped its ads business to integrate more AI tools. This month, X rolled out a new tool that uses AI to connect brands with creators that might be a good fit for their campaigns.
