As more brands pull off Twitter, SpaceX gets a huge Twitter ad package. SpaceX has spent more than $160,000 on Twitter so far

According to Musk, the fact that SpaceX received this advertising package is nothing special. The CEO of SpaceX and Twitter hit back at a media outlet for describing the ad investment as “significant.”

Elon Musk’s aerospace company SpaceX has ordered one of the biggest advertising packages available from Twitter, the social media company he just acquired and is now CEO of, in a $44 billion deal. The campaign will promote Starlink, a satellite internet service owned and operated by SpaceX, on Twitter in Spain and Australia.

The ad campaign SpaceX took to promote Starlink is called the Twitter takeover. According to a current and former Twitter employee, when a business buys one of these plans, it typically spends more than $250,000 to put its brand at the top of Twitter’s main timeline for a day. to speak on behalf of the company.

Users in Australia and Spain are expected to see Starlink-branded posts the first three times they open the Twitter app on the day or days of the planned takeover campaign. The campaign, which was bought last week, was to be released in the coming days first in Australia and then in Spain.

SpaceX has generally not received large Twitter advertising packages, current and former employees said.

A few hours after this story was first published, Musk tweeted: SpaceX Starlink received a small, not-so-large ad package to test the effectiveness of Twitter advertising in Australia and Spain. I did the same on Facebook/Insta/Google.

SpaceX has so far spent more than $160,000 on a Twitter ad campaign for Starlink in Australia and Spain, according to internal documents reviewed by CNBC.

Starlink uses a series of satellites that transmit internet to paid subscribers who must acquire SpaceX terminals to access the internet. SpaceX designed Starlink to provide high-speed Internet connectivity for people in places where cable or fiber-optic infrastructure is not available.

In Ukraine, Starlink service has provided vital connectivity for the country’s military and some civilians since Russia’s brutal invasion destroyed its communications infrastructure. While SpaceX covered some of the costs of providing the service in Ukraine, Musk later complained about how the donations hurt his company’s profit margins.

Pressure on Twitter ad sales

In addition to his positions at SpaceX and Twitter, Musk is CEO of electric car maker Tesla. He boasted that the automaker did not spend money on traditional advertising such as print, radio, television and online ads. Instead, Tesla garners headlines from fan blogs, news sites, and generates buzz through car clubs, fan or shareholder events, and social media presence.

Musk now has to sell online advertising as Chief Twit, or more formally CEO, of Twitter, which remains a major international social media platform. Before Musk’s controversial privatization deal, Twitter had 237.8 million monetizable daily active users. Musk is on a mission to get at least half of Twitter’s revenue from followers, not just advertising.

The campaign, even on the scale of a takeover, isn’t enough to make up for the loss of the many advertisers who recently halted Twitter spending or fled the platform during Musk’s rocky takeover.

Companies such as General Motors, Audi, Volkswagen, General Mills, Pfizer, United Airlines and others have suspended advertising spending on Twitter for the time being due to the wave of hate speech and misinformation spreading on the platform. Advertising giant Interpublic Group has advised its agency clients to do the same. Twitter used to get about 90% of its revenue from advertising.

When Musk launched a paid subscriber badge on Twitter last week and then quickly stopped it, it further undermined advertisers’ confidence in the platform. The badge looked like a blue tick in the past review and cost users $7.99 per month. Inexpensively available blue ticks were used by pranksters and fraudsters to impersonate brands, politicians and celebrities and send inaccurate and inaccurate messages.

An account identifying the pharmaceutical company as Eli Lilly caused serious trouble on Thursday when it posted a message saying, “We’re happy to announce that insulin is now free.” The tweet went viral and remained on Twitter for at least two hours before being deleted. Eli Lilly’s real account later tweeted: Apologies to anyone who received a misleading message from the fake Lilly account.

Eli Lilly’s stock price fell sharply after the fake tweet was published, although major stock indexes were positive at the time, with the S&P 500 posting its biggest rally in two years. Musk-led automaker Tesla, SpaceX rival Lockheed Martin, Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and many others have also been emulated on the platform.

This weekend, Musk tweeted: Twitter drives a lot of clicks to other websites/apps. It’s the biggest click driver on the web ever.* Twitter’s new CEO was quickly corrected by marketing experts and former Twitter employees, adding a correction note to his tweet. He later deleted the tweet.

Former Twitter employee Claire Daz-Ortiz chimed in: These are lies. Worked at @twitter for 5 years + wrote 2 books on social media marketing. This is wrong and @twitter knows it. We have never sold on clicks because we have very low traffic from Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. Twitter has other major assets (and marketing is about more than clicks).

The threat of bankruptcy

A transcript of a staff meeting with Elon Musk shows that Musk is trying to figure out what his priorities are to help keep Twitter afloat as the economy remains stable. Musk kept his answers short, saying that the top priorities were getting Twitter’s user base to one billion (critically more users), rewarding creators in the form of the platform, and improving search on Twitter. In short, he told the rest of his team to “just be tough” to make Twitter more attractive, so he could either sell the product to users or abandon it altogether. One of his biggest and most widespread ideas, which he says is “definitely coming to fruition,” is turning Twitter into a digital payments platform.

If you have an attractive product, people will buy it, “said Musk. This was my experience at SpaceX and Tesla.

Musk’s brutal honesty about Twitter’s potential bankruptcy has fueled doubts that the platform will survive under Musk’s leadership style. In addition to Twitter having $13 billion in debt at the time of the acquisition, and then losing $4 million a day in ad revenue, Musk now faces interest payments that Reuters said will total $1.2 billion over the next 12 months.

Those interest payments will be more than Twitter’s last cash flow of $1.1 billion in June, according to Reuters. And Musk’s team seems well aware of that risk, feeling compelled to perform well and asking Musk how he plans to solve the cash flow problem.

We must bring in more money than we spend,” Musk replied. If we don’t and there’s a huge negative cash flow, then bankruptcy won’t happen.

Some wonder if Musk is using the term to encourage employees who feel attached to the platform to give it their all to survive. It should be noted that Bloomberg has noted that Musk has used the threat of financial loss to motivate his employees in the past. Bloomberg, familiar with Musk’s management style, said, “He’s trying to convey that if people don’t work hard, Twitter is going to be in really bad shape.”

Of course, the threat of bankruptcy does not only affect personnel. Bloomberg said debt investors and credit scorers were equally concerned by Musk’s revelations, sending inquiries to hedge funds and asset managers to see if anyone was willing to buy back some of the debt. Banks that helped finance Twitter with a $6.5 billion loan could face billions in losses, according to Bloomberg estimates.

Musk continues to pour money into Twitter as banks weigh options in this environment, The New York Times reports, selling $4 billion in Tesla stock to save Twitter.

Sources: Elon Musk, Claire Diaz

And you?

What do you think of SpaceX’s Twitter ad spend? How do you analyze this situation in light of the comments of Twitter employees who claim that SpaceX does not spend much money on its platform and Elon Musk, who claims that his company is doing the same on Facebook, Instagram and Google? The tree that hides the forest?
Is this strategy likely to attract advertisers? Why?

See also:

Elon Musk proposes to turn Twitter into a bank to avoid bankruptcy. Musk aims to grow Twitter users to one billion, then link accounts to debit cards
Elon Musk fires engineer who corrected him on Twitter. Developer Eric Frohnhoefer publicly questioned Musk’s assessment in an apologetic tweet.