Tesla’s ad spending on X has hardly reduced

Tesla spent $400,000 ads on Elon Musk’s social media platform X in 2024, according to a new regulator’s filing. However, automakers seem to be on track to spend just a small portion of that in 2025 as sales struggle.

In the first two months of 2025, Tesla has spent $10,000 on X ads and is on track to spend $60,000 a year, unless it fundamentally increases the remaining ads of the year. During the same period last year, they had already spent $200,000 on X, Tesla revealed. Tesla’s spending was considerably late after the first two months, paying another $200,000 for the rest of 2024.

Tesla never advertised. After CEO Elon Musk succumbed to shareholder pressure in 2023, he said his company would give it a try. Ads for the company’s cars began appearing on Google results and YouTube from late 2023 to early 2024.

Google’s Ads Transparency Database shows Tesla still has around 700 active ads across Google properties such as search and YouTube, but it’s unclear whether spending has risen since February with X. The company did not respond to requests for comment.

Elsewhere in the mask world, Tesla revealed that it paid SpaceX to about $800,000 to use one of the rocket company’s private jets. This is an agreement that is usually very utilized to travel around the headquarters of various companies that Musk oversees. However, even those costs appear to be steadily cutting in 2025. Tesla only paid about $40,000 for the SpaceX from February 2025 to February 2025 for the jet use.

It’s not cheap to protect musk during all of that trip either. Tesla has revealed in its proxy that it paid $2.8 million in 2024 to a security company owned by Musk. This is an increase from the $2.4 million I paid when I first worked for a security company in 2023.

However, last year’s biggest deal between musk companies came from Xai. Xai actually paid Tesla for $183 million. Almost all of that was due to Tesla’s Megapack battery storage products that Xai uses in its Tennessee data center. Xai paid Tesla an additional $36.8 million for its Megapack product for the first two months of the year.

Tesla’s success is good for Musk’s brother Kim Baru. Not only is he a member of the board, but the new proxying revealed that Tesla had paid $300,000 for his show at his drone company Nova Sky Stories, the carmaker’s “We, Robot” event in October 2024.