SpaceX’s IPO Filing Shows Elon’s Twitter ‘Business Genius’ Was A Fantasy | Techdirt

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SpaceX’s IPO Filing Shows Elon’s Twitter ‘Business Genius’ Was A Fantasy

Earnings, IPOs, and the like

from the turning-gold-into-lead dept

Fri, May 22nd 2026 09:32am -

Mike Masnick

Elon Musk, business genius. When Elon Musk announced his plans to buy Twitter, some of his billionaire friends rushed to text him to say they’d throw whatever money they wanted into the deal. Larry Ellison casually offered "a billion… or whatever you recommend." Marc Andreessen offered $250 million, no questions asked. This all came out in the lawsuit when Musk tried to back out of the deal:

Publicly, these billionaires insisted that Elon was a sure shot business genius who would easily make them much richer. Elon then sent around a presentation to other investors who would perhaps take a bit more convincing. The NY Times got its hands on Elon’s clearly pulled-out-of-his-ass projections. $26.4 billion in revenue by 2028! That included $12 billion from advertising, $10 billion from subscriptions and the rest from licensing.

Remember, at the time, Twitter’s ad revenue was decent: $4.51 billion in 2021 (its last full year as a public company) with another half a billion in licensing revenue. So Elon was suggesting he had the magic formula for massively increasing ad revenue and subscription revenue.

There was plenty of reporting over the last few years on how the opposite happened. Ad revenue absolutely tanked. It got so bad that the company started suing advertisers for not advertising on the newly renamed X (and threatening advertisers that choosing not to advertise would get them added to the lawsuit), pretending that it was some sort of antitrust violation. It took a court to point out that this was utter nonsense.

Anyway, given the private nature of X, we didn’t have any real official confirmation on some of the revenue numbers. But in the last year and a half, Elon has been merging his Xs. He merged X into xAI, then merged xAI into SpaceX. And now SpaceX has filed for a massive IPO, giving us an S1 with some financial information about how X is actually performing after all.

Of course, by merging all these companies, it gives Elon a bit of a chance to obfuscate the numbers. The user metrics, for example, show both users of X and xAI’s grok (which are not all the same). Also, somewhat ironically given Elon’s pretextual whining about how there were too many bots on Twitter, the S1 admits that a lot of the activity on X these days is almost certainly bots and they apparently have no way to break out how many humans still use the service:

“supported accounts” refers to, when used in the context of our X platform and Grok, a human, bot or similar account that logged into the X platform or Grok. The total number of supported accounts may include fake, spam or bot accounts if they are active.

Gosh. I thought you were taking over the site to get rid of all the bots and spam.

Anyhoo, now that we have some numbers, let’s compare them to what Elon sold his investors.

Remember, the plan was $26.4 billion by 2028. We’re more than halfway there. How’s it going? Well… when he combines xAI (grok) revenue with X revenue (so not even just breaking out X’s ad revenue)… we get… a total of $3.201 billion in 2025. So, just to put this in perspective… when he took over in 2022 he laid out a five year plan to take the company that had $4.5 billion in ad revenue the year before he bought it up to $12 billion in five years. Three years in and… it’s now somewhere pretty far below $3 billion. And they’re proud of the fact it’s finally started to go up again:

Revenue for the year ended December 31, 2025 increased by $581 million, or 22.2%, compared to the prior year ended December 31, 2024. This increase was primarily due to an increase in advertising revenue of $116 million as advertising spend increased from advertising partners on X and an increase in AI solutions and infrastructure revenue of $465 million.

So… from 2024 to 2025… they increased advertising revenue on X… by… $116 million, after knocking it down by somewhere in the range of $2 billion? BUSINESS GENIUS.

But, that’s okay. Part of the pitch was that he was going to get advertising to be less than 50% of Twitter’s revenue by 2028 because it was going to be replaced by a massive wave of subscription revenue. $10 billion by 2028! Musk predicted 69 million users of Twitter Blue (what became X Premium) by 2025 and 159 million in 2028. And then also another 104 million subscribers to a mysterious "X" subscription by 2028, which was not explained in the pitch. Even though this was...