X ad – X’s 2025 ad revenue rose to $1.8 billion, about 7% higher than 2024, but it remains sharply below 2023 and far behind 2021—an uneven comeback story tied to Musk’s strained advertiser relationship, legal battles, and the company’s shift toward xAI.
In 2023, Elon Musk told marketers who were skipping X ads to “go fuck yourself.” It wasn’t a throwaway line in a quiet quarter. It landed in the middle of a business that runs on trust—brands paying for access to audiences—and it set a tone that would shadow X’s ad push for years.
By 2025, X’s parent company, SpaceX, disclosed a clear snapshot of how that relationship has played out financially. Ad revenue reached $1.8 billion in 2025, up around 7% from 2024. But the gains weren’t a full reset. The same figures showed ad 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.
The numbers were revealed in an S-1 filing by SpaceX, offering the most concrete timeline yet of how X’s ad machine has moved—sometimes forward, often not far enough.
Musk’s efforts to rebuild advertiser confidence intensified when Linda Yaccarino joined the company in 2023 to woo marketers. Yaccarino previously ran ad sales at NBCUniversal. Her hiring was meant to signal a practical change: more experience, more focus on advertisers, fewer surprises.
Yet the tension with the ad industry didn’t fade.
A year later. X sued an advertising trade group. The World Federation of Advertisers. and some of its members. including CVS. Unilever. and Mars. X alleged they violated antitrust law by collectively withholding ad spend. The dispute ended with a judge tossing 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. Her departure came as X’s revenue story started to shift in a direction where ad sales were no longer the center of gravity.
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. The ad industry insiders who previously spoke described buying ads on the app as a cost of doing business—an accommodation to appease Musk and his allies in President Donald Trump’s White House.
But the story didn’t stabilize. Musk left his government role, and his relationship with the Trump administration has since become more muddled.
Still, X’s bigger pivot arrived in March 2025. That month, Musk decided to merge the app into his artificial intelligence company, xAI. As AI revenue began to grow faster than advertising revenue. ad sales started to matter less to the overall balance sheet. In 2025, xAI’s AI revenue reached around $1.35 billion—up 52% from the previous year.
After 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, it rolled out a new tool designed to use AI to connect brands with creators that might be a good fit for their campaigns.
The sequence is stark: the ad line showed modest growth in 2025 while still falling back against earlier years. even as X tried to reset its relationship with advertisers through leadership changes. legal pressure. and product upgrades—at the same time that the company’s financial emphasis moved toward xAI’s faster-rising revenue.
X Elon Musk advertising revenue SpaceX S-1 filing Linda Yaccarino The World Federation of Advertisers antitrust lawsuit CVS Unilever Mars xAI AI revenue Donald Trump advertiser relations