Mike Masnick writes:

When SpaceX filed for its IPO, we went through the S-1 to point out just how far off the mark Elon Musk’s predictions about his Twitter takeover turned out to be. Indeed, the failure of Twitter as a business was so catastrophic, Musk had to hide it by merging all his Xs together: he had xAI buy X (formerly Twitter), and then had SpaceX buy xAI. But when Musk was buying Twitter and needed investors, he made bold promises about how he would succeed — promises the media and his investors treated as perfectly reasonable. He said he would take Twitter’s ad revenue from $4.5 billion in 2021 to $12 billion in 2027 (and then also many more billions in subscription revenue).

Now that SpaceX is a public company, he has to report some of that revenue, though it’s all merged and buried in footnotes. But there’s enough info in there to show that advertising revenue is way, way below what it was when he took over the site. And it’s shrinking.

In the 10-Q, all of X’s revenue is now (misleadingly) labeled “AI” revenue, but even then the reporting has to admit ad revenue took a big hit, dropping $160 million compared to the first half of 2025 (which was already way, way, way lower than when Elon took over the site), going from $870 million in 2025 to $710 million in the first half of 2026. The company tries to claim that this decrease in ad revenue is because they “transitioned to a new advertising platform which impacted ad sales for a short period of time.” Which is a curious explanation, given that on the analyst call, CFO Bret Johnsen credited that very same “overhauled” ad-tech platform for the very slight quarter-over-quarter uptick in ad revenue. The same overhaul apparently both tanked the business and rescued it, depending on which direction the number was moving. [Continue reading…]