• by Joe Mandese , 2 hours ago

It's been nearly three years since Elon Musk sat on stage at a high-profile New York Times event and told the ad industry to "go [expletive deleted] yourself." In retrospect, it appears he may have been referring to himself, because that's exactly what the data released by his publicly traded SpaceX shows.

SpaceX -- which now includes the remnants of what was Twitter and is now called Xai -- reported just $367 million in advertising revenue for the second quarter of 2026, about a third of the $1.076 billion that Twitter reported in its last publicly traded quarter in 2022.

That was just before Elon Musk paid $44 billion to acquire Twitter, take it private, rebrand it X, abandon most of the platform's brand-safety efforts, disenfranchise the ad industry, sue some of the world's largest advertisers, as well as the highly-regarded global trade association (the World Federation of Advertisers) for organizing a global alliance for responsible media, and got it to settle by agreeing not to ever organize an alliance to promote responsible media again.

Did I leave anything out?

You can revisit Musk's profane attack on the ad industry in the Times' summit video below and go to the 11-minute mark if you want to hear the "good" stuff.

Clearly, Musk has had a chilling effect on the ad industry, but in retrospect the chill cuts both ways.