• by Joe Mandese , August 5, 2026

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?

Oh yeah, at presstime, Musk filed arguments with the appeals court to revive his "brazen boycott" suit against the responsible media advertisers, so it ain't over until it's over.

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.