Elon Musk’s Grandiose Media Ambitions Are Now a Real Threat to Some Major Players
It turns out that Elon Musk‘s “go fuck yourself” moment was a pivot point for X.
Musk, of course, acquired the social platform formerly known as Twitter in 2022, eventually rebranding it simply as “X.” But the slew of changes he made, including a degradation of “verified” users and a commitment to free speech that also allowed for previously banned content to return to the platform led to an advertising boycott.
So in late November 2023, Musk appeared at The New York Times Dealbook conference, where he let loose: “Don’t advertise,” he told marketers watching. “If someone is going to try and blackmail me with advertising? Blackmail me with money? Go fuck yourself.”
It appears they listened, though the specifics of that collapse had been somewhat hidden, until now, thanks to internal financials disclosed by the company in connection with an IPO.
In 2021, Twitter’s last full year as a public company, it has more than $4 billion in advertising revenue. In 2023, it fell to $2.3 billion, before falling even further in 2024 to $1.73 billion.
But Musk is not one to let things go, and with its parent company SpaceX now set to go public, his broader media ambitions, which include X, are becoming a bit clearer. To that end, in 2025, for the first time since Musk bought the company, X’s ad revenue went up, to $1.84 billion, the filings show.
To say SpaceX is a company with ambition is something of an understatement.
The venture, controlled by Musk, has officially filed its paperwork to go public (called a form S-1), and the document underscores those immodest ambitions, which include statements like “we believe we have identified the largest actionable total addressable market (‘TAM’) in human history,” and longer-term goals of “passenger and cargo transport to the Moon and Mars” and “asteroid mining,” both of which will presumably rely on the company’s well-known prowess in designing and building rockets.
But of more relevance to the entertainment industry is a goal of siphoning away ad dollars and subscription commitments, and a very real threat to owners of telecom players like Comcast and AT&T, where SpaceX’s Starlink internet ambitions are still nascent but growing fast.
SpaceX’s TAM includes the $600 billion advertising market, betting that it can steal commitments from the likes of Disney and Meta. And it includes the $760 billion consumer subscriptions market, taking share from Netflix and ChatGPT. The company sees a $1.6 trillion opportunity in connectivity, split across $870 billion in Starlink Broadband (where it is actively targeting the likes of Comcast and Charter) and $740 billion in Starlink Mobile (ditto for Verizon and T-Mobile).
On the advertising front, X appears to be on the mend after years of decline (though confusingly the company’s ad business took a $100 million hit in Q1 “due to an overhaul of the Company’s advertising platform which impacted ad sales for a short period of time during the rebuild”).
The company is rolling out a suite of new products meant to entice both marketers to spend and creators to create, with renewed emphasis on video, given where ad dollars are flowing. Mitchell Smith, the global head of content partnerships for X, told The Hollywood Reporter in an interview that “we’ve really been looking at this as the year where we’re entering our creator era as a platform, and really trying to build a platform that fosters a healthy creator economy.”
Indeed, the SpaceX S-1 declares that “advertising remains a core monetization channel for our AI segment, with revenue driven by our ability to deliver highly relevant ads.
“We aim to grow advertising revenue per user by strengthening performance advertising, expanding AI‑driven targeting and measurement, and introducing richer ad formats and creative tools,” it continues. “A central focus of ours is making ads feel like content — contextually relevant, aligned with user interests, and integrated into real‑time conversations.”
There are signs beyond the revenue improvement that the advertising push is working, much to the chagrin of legacy media companies that perhaps hope that they have less tech competition.
“Marketers are no longer shying away from platforms with inventory they may have historically characterized as brand ‘unsafe’ or ‘unsuitable,’ in some instances because marketers genuinely want to reach consumers wherever they are and in others because they are mindful of commercial or legal considerations that may follow from avoiding platforms such as X,” writes Madison and Wall analyst Brian Wieser in a May 20 note.
Subscription revenue is similarly growing, though it remains quite small compared to other lines of business. SpaceX reports that X and Grok now have 6.3 million active paid subscribers, comprised of approximately 4.4 million X Premium and Premium+ paid subscribers and approximately 1.9 million SuperGrok, SuperGrok Heavy and SuperGrok Lite paid subscribers. Those subscribers surely generate $100s millions in annual recurring revenue, even if they are small compared to the likes of Netflix.
And while OpenAI abandoned video generation when it shut down Sora, Musk and Grok are leaning into the tech, with the filing revealing that “our image and video generation system, Imagine, produced approximately 10 billion images and over 2 billion videos per month” in Q1 2026.
In fact, after OpenAI shuttered Sora, Musk posted “The next @Grok Imagine release will be epic. We are doubling down.”
Of course, generative AI video also brings with it a wave of risks, which were also reflected in the filing.
“Certain of our AI products, including Grok, offer features or modes designed to generate more candid, direct, or less reserved or irreverent outputs, such as ‘Spicy’ Imagine Mode and ‘Unhinged’ Voice Mode,” the filing states in the “risk factors” section. “These features are intended to provide users with greater flexibility and control in how they use our tools. Because these modes may be more irreverent and harsher than our standard offerings, they present heightened risks, including reputational harm, the generation of potentially explicit content and misinformation or deceptive outputs, potential nonconsensual or exploitative imagery, intellectual property infringement, or content that could be viewed as exploitative, harmful, harassing, abusive, or discriminatory.
“The availability of such features may also increase the risk of regulatory scrutiny, enforcement actions, litigation, or claims of harm, as well as reputational damage, user or advertiser backlash, or limitations on our ability to distribute or monetize our products in certain jurisdictions or through certain partners,” it continues.
In some ways the simplest and most straightforward threat by SpaceX against legacy media is against the middlemen themselves. Comcast leveraged its regional monopoly over pay-TV and home internet to acquire NBCUniversal. Charter and AT&T have not been shy about leveraging their scale to do massive deals.
Starlink presents a real and present threat to those businesses, and others that rely on them (looking at you pay-TV).
Starlink is by far the most profitable part of SpaceX’s business, with 10.3 million internet subscribers as of March 31, up from 8.9 million at the end of last year, and 4.4 million at the end of 2024. Starlink income was nearly $1.2 billion in Q1, with $11 billion in annual revenue.
Of course that growth came at a cost. SpaceX says that it spent $69 million on advertising in 2025, more than double the $31 million it spent a year prior. And that number appears to be rising.
According to data from iSpot, Starlink spent $8.4 million on linear TV advertising between Feb. 8 and the beginning of April. That does not include the company’s high-profile Super Bowl ad, where the cost of entry starts at $10 million and only goes up. Nor did that include the final few games of March Madness, where it was also present.
According to iSpot, the company is using both big sports and other methods in search of mass reach.
“Starlink’s ad approach this year has looked to use TV in order to maximize audience reach and awareness,” said Tyler Bobin, director, brand solutions at iSpot. “While that has included buys during major sporting events like March Madness, the World Baseball Classic and the Daytona 500, the brand has also balanced this premium programming strategy with lower-CPM buys on sitcom and drama reruns that deliver tons of impressions without the same elevated price point of sports.”
The tech is also rollout to commercial airlines like United, which are betting that bringing high-speed internet to the skies can kickstart a new version of the streaming wars.
“There’s going to be a lot more that we can do with Starlink and our seat back systems in the future, we have a lot of really creative ideas,” Andrew Nocella, United’s executive VP and chief commercial officer, told The Hollywood Reporter. “When you combine seatback entertainment with Starlink technology, it opens up a world of possibilities that only airlines that have those two combinations can unlock.”
The threat from Starlink is being felt across the industry: Comcast stock is down nearly 24 percent from a year ago, Charter is down 64 percent, AT&T is down nearly 8 percent, while T-Mobile is down 21 percent.
Some analysts, however, think things are overblown.
Bank of America’s Michael Funk, for example, argued May 20 that the sell-off could provide an entry point for investors.
“Since September 2025 investor interest and concern that low earth orbit (LEO) providers could become a competitive threat has increased,” Funk wrote. “We view LEO as complimentary rather than competitive to wireless operators and a greater threat to rural DLS and cable. However, rising awareness of LEO platforms and speculation surrounding plans for space based or dual LEO/terrestrial wireless platforms is likely to increase and potentially pressure telecom multiples in the short term.”
Musk’s ambitions, of course, are much broader. If SpaceX wants to establish “a lunar economy and interplanetary industrialization,” as it hopes to, it will need high-quality connectivity services, after all. A market-leading AI and high-speed internet for your house or phone is a piece of cake by comparison.
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