Elon Musk: To Reach the Smartest People, Advertise on X
Elon Musk posted that to reach the smartest people in the world, one should advertise on X. This is a recurring advertising pitch he has used, previously stating that X gathers the most influential and highest purchasing power audiences, and that key decision-makers do not use short video platforms, with important announcements happening on X.
Recently, the advertising business roadshow highlighted Grok matching as a selling point: using models to understand user interests, delivering dynamic product ads, and planning to insert ads into Grok responses, with advertisers only needing to upload materials while the model handles the rest. He stated that X's audience purchasing power is in the trillions, targeting CEOs, heads of state, and real-world opinion leaders. Third-party and regulatory documents show that Twitter's advertising revenue was about $4.5 billion annually before the acquisition; after a significant decline from 2023 to 2024, it is expected to rebound to a range of $1.8 billion to $2.3 billion in 2025, still significantly below pre-acquisition peaks. Quarterly disclosures indicate advertising revenue of about $340 million to $370 million, still weaker than historical periods. The head of advertising previously stated that the vast majority of the top 100 advertisers have returned, but independent monitoring shows that actual spending recovery in the U.S. is uneven.
X's advertising is now incorporated into a larger aerospace and AI report, with subscription and data licensing growth outpacing advertising, leading to a decrease in advertising's share of combined revenue. After brand safety controversies, the platform emphasized that ads only appear in positions allowed by advertisers and used third-party effectiveness data to persuade media agencies.
In market mechanics, buyers are brands looking to reach executives and policymakers, while sellers are X, bundling timelines with Grok; the driving force is founder traffic and model targeting, rather than the brand safety commitments from before the acquisition. Funds are flowing from advertising budgets to the platform, while also being diverted by subscriptions and APIs. Benefiting are those who can write "smart people are here" as a premium sales narrative, while pressured are the advertising expenditures that have not yet returned to 2021 levels, and brands that allocate budgets to short videos and search.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
Musk has shifted the advertising message from "don't advertise" to "advertise to smart people," with the phrasing unchanged for four years, while the deliverables have changed: from random exposure on timelines to Grok vector matching. The halving of advertising revenue post-acquisition and its weak recovery indicates that the density of decision-makers can serve as a talking point, but it is difficult to independently pull CPM back to its original trajectory. After integrating X into a larger group, advertising has become just one line in the AI segment, with roadshow focus shifting to models doing work for advertisers, reducing reliance on media review departments.
The capital path involves using the founder's account as a free showcase and leveraging Grok to lower advertising operational costs. The trillion-dollar purchasing power is a sum of users' net assets, not a validated conversion funnel. The gap between the list of returning brands and monitoring expenditures shows that "they have returned" and "spending the same money again" are not the same thing. Subscriptions and licensing are replacing advertising as a more stable cash source, and advertising slogans need to serve clients who still make decisions based on brand budgets, rather than the company's internal revenue structure.
Similar platforms have all experienced a transition from traffic myths to performance metrics: Meta proved with remarketing, TikTok with completion rates and stores, and X with celebrity density. The industry phase is that performance advertising requires auditability, while celebrity platforms require trust restoration. Those who cannot turn "the smartest" into reproducible conversions can only repeatedly post the same recruitment message.
Structurally, this is a struggle for pricing power: media treats user intelligence as inventory ratings. The mechanism is that high-net-worth user attention is scarce, but advertisers pay for incremental sales; when narrative premiums encounter performance reports, they will fall back, leading the platform to frame model targeting as a reason for the next round of price increases, using technological updates to mask the fact that the current figures are still below pre-acquisition levels.
ABAB News · Law of Cognition
Platforms claiming to have the most smart people are mostly selling ad space
Purchasing power can be summed, but budgets only recognize incremental
The unchanged slogan for four years indicates that reports have yet to speak for it