SpaceX held its first earnings call as a public company last Tuesday (U.S. Eastern Time), clocking in at just one hour. In that entire hour, X's advertising business got mentioned exactly once — a brief line from CFO Bret Johnsen noting that quarterly ad revenue growth came from an "overhauled" ad tech platform. That was it. No follow-up questions, no further details.
But the numbers themselves say plenty. According to the earnings report, X pulled in $367 million in ad revenue for Q2 (April to June), a slight bump from the previous quarter's $343 million, but still down from $426 million in the same period last year. The truly brutal comparison, though, goes back further: in Q2 2022 — the last time Twitter reported earnings as a public company — ad revenue sat at $1.08 billion. Three years later, that business has shrunk to less than a third of what it once was.
Everything Elon Musk has done since taking over in 2022 is baked into these numbers: mass layoffs, lawsuits against advertisers who fled, and publicly telling ad buyers to "go fuck themselves." Meanwhile, the company has been pushing subscriptions hard, with the Premium+ tier stripping ads from the timeline entirely — though SpaceX didn't disclose X's subscription revenue or daily active user numbers this time around, so the real state of that business remains a mystery to outsiders.
Back in January, an X ad executive told Digiday that 97 of the platform's top 100 advertisers had returned, with some even spending more than they did before Musk's takeover. Even if that's true, advertising now barely registers as a blip in SpaceX's broader empire: the same earnings report shows AI (largely through the Anthropic partnership) bringing in $2.2 billion, Starlink generating $4.3 billion, and the "space" segment pulling in $962 million. Advertising used to be Twitter's lifeblood. Now, in SpaceX's earnings table, it's just another line item among many.
