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03-27-2026, 12:40 AM
Elon Musk’s X has let go of its chief marketing officer and conducted a round of layoffs of nontechnical staff over the last several weeks as it looks to right-size the social-media company ahead of its parent company SpaceX’s potential $1 trillion-plus IPO, people familiar with the matter said.
Angela Zepeda, X’s marketing chief since September 2024, was let go last month after Musk announced xAI and SpaceX’s merger, people familiar with the matter said. Over the past few weeks, X let go of more than 20 staffers in nontechnical roles including marketing and other departments that were seen as duplicative to jobs inside the merged company, the people said.
X merged with xAI last year and xAI and SpaceX combined in early February.
Most of the remaining staff at X, in addition to concentrating on cost-cutting, have been told to focus on growing X’s revenue since xAI brought on a chief revenue officer, Jon Shulkin, some of the people said. Shulkin is also a partner at longtime Musk investor Valor Equity Partners. He is broadly looking to boost revenue for Musk’s social-media company and his artificial-intelligence startup, which both lag competitors in revenue for social-media ads and in enterprise AI sales, those people said.
X’s U.S. ad revenue is expected to grow 1.5% to $1.27 billion, while global ad sales are anticipated to rise 2.2% to $2.19 billion, according to estimates from Emarketer. In 2021, the last year in which X disclosed annual financials before Musk took the company private, Twitter said it generated $4.51 billion in advertising revenue.
The moves at X echo what’s happening elsewhere inside the company since the xAI-SpaceX merger. Several co-founders at xAI have since announced they were leaving the company and several teams have been restructured. That includes the “vision” team focused on video generation for xAI’s Grok, a person familiar with the matter said.
Major advertisers left the platform over content moderation concerns and turmoil stemming from the departure of senior X executives, but some started to increase spending on the platform after President Trump’s 2024 election, including Amazon, The Wall Street Journal has reported. Musk campaigned for Trump and donated more than $250 million to pro-Trump political groups before the election.
Since the departures of Zepeda and former X Chief Executive Linda Yaccarino, management of X has been delegated to Shulkin and Monique Pintarelli, xAI’s head of global advertising. Pintarelli announced her elevated role on LinkedIn about a month ago; she is now leading sales, content partnerships and marketing teams for the X platform.
The company is pushing ahead with plans to roll out X Money, a payments business within the social-media platform, some of the people familiar with the matter said. X Money has faced delays because of the need to set up operations compliant with money-services laws in all 50 states, such as customer-service operations, those people said. Musk said on X on March 10 that X Money would offer early public access next month.
Angela Zepeda, X’s marketing chief since September 2024, was let go last month after Musk announced xAI and SpaceX’s merger, people familiar with the matter said. Over the past few weeks, X let go of more than 20 staffers in nontechnical roles including marketing and other departments that were seen as duplicative to jobs inside the merged company, the people said.
X merged with xAI last year and xAI and SpaceX combined in early February.
Most of the remaining staff at X, in addition to concentrating on cost-cutting, have been told to focus on growing X’s revenue since xAI brought on a chief revenue officer, Jon Shulkin, some of the people said. Shulkin is also a partner at longtime Musk investor Valor Equity Partners. He is broadly looking to boost revenue for Musk’s social-media company and his artificial-intelligence startup, which both lag competitors in revenue for social-media ads and in enterprise AI sales, those people said.
X’s U.S. ad revenue is expected to grow 1.5% to $1.27 billion, while global ad sales are anticipated to rise 2.2% to $2.19 billion, according to estimates from Emarketer. In 2021, the last year in which X disclosed annual financials before Musk took the company private, Twitter said it generated $4.51 billion in advertising revenue.
The moves at X echo what’s happening elsewhere inside the company since the xAI-SpaceX merger. Several co-founders at xAI have since announced they were leaving the company and several teams have been restructured. That includes the “vision” team focused on video generation for xAI’s Grok, a person familiar with the matter said.
Major advertisers left the platform over content moderation concerns and turmoil stemming from the departure of senior X executives, but some started to increase spending on the platform after President Trump’s 2024 election, including Amazon, The Wall Street Journal has reported. Musk campaigned for Trump and donated more than $250 million to pro-Trump political groups before the election.
Since the departures of Zepeda and former X Chief Executive Linda Yaccarino, management of X has been delegated to Shulkin and Monique Pintarelli, xAI’s head of global advertising. Pintarelli announced her elevated role on LinkedIn about a month ago; she is now leading sales, content partnerships and marketing teams for the X platform.
The company is pushing ahead with plans to roll out X Money, a payments business within the social-media platform, some of the people familiar with the matter said. X Money has faced delays because of the need to set up operations compliant with money-services laws in all 50 states, such as customer-service operations, those people said. Musk said on X on March 10 that X Money would offer early public access next month.
