A new report sheds light on how advertising is going at Elon Musk’s X — and the numbers aren’t good

• Ad revenue at Elon Musk’s X, formerly Twitter, isn’t looking too hot this year, per Bloomberg.
• Big spenders like Apple and Walmart pulled ads after Musk endorsed antisemitic views on his site.
• At a summit last month, Musk said advertisers trying to “blackmail” him should “go f*** yourself.”

It turns out telling your biggest advertisers to “go f*** yourself” isn’t a winning strategy for selling ads. Who knew?

Ad revenue at Elon Musk’s X, formerly known as Twitter, has dropped considerably this year, according to a Bloomberg article published Tuesday.

The company is expected to generate about $2.5 billion in ad revenue this year, compared to more than $1 billion per quarter last year, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the matter.

Musk’s offhand remarks came after major advertisers like Apple, IBM, and Disney pulled their ads from his platform after he called one X user’s antisemitic post the “actual truth.”

“If somebody is going to try to blackmail me with advertising, blackmail me with money, go fuck yourself,” he said at DealBook’s summit. “Go fuck yourself. Is that clear? I hope it is.”

Musk also expressed regret over responding to the antisemitic X post, saying he “in retrospect should not have replied to that one person.”

Of course, X’s ad business struggled well before Musk made his offhand remarks at the New York Times’ DealBook summit late last month.

X saw several heavyweight advertisers leave in the wake of Musk’s takeover of the company last year. Musk estimated in July that X had seen a roughly 50% drop in ad revenue.

“Bloomberg presents an incomplete view of our entire business, as the sources Bloomberg relied on for information are not providing accurate and comprehensive details,” said Joe Benarroch, X’s head of business operations, in a statement to Business Insider.

“Bloomberg’s story does not represent the full picture of an evolving global business with multiple revenue streams. We are not Twitter any longer and are not measuring ourselves by old Twitter metrics — both in revenue and user metrics — we’re X, and have three revenue streams and are looking at our business in a completely new way.”

If advertisers don’t come back, the consequences could be dire for X, and Musk has said so himself.

Addressing the hypothetical situation, Musk said at DealBook’s summit, “What this advertising boycott is going to do is it’s going to kill the company.”