Over the last few week, X eliminated over 20 nontechnical roles, and has laid off Angela Zepeda, the ad industry veteran who joined the social platform in 2024 as its head of global marketing, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.
Zepeda’s LinkedIn profile indicates she lost her job last month.
The company is trimming talent as its billionaire owner Elon Musk prepares to take his rocket company SpaceX public in an IPO targeting a valuation of around $1 trillion. SpaceX could reportedly file as soon as this week. X was folded into Musk’s AI company xAI in a $45 billion merger last year; then, early this year, SpaceX also joined xAI.
Zepeda was the first true marketing leader appointed at X in the Musk era, filling a role that had been vacant since 2022.
Her priority at the platform was to distill X’s image and ethos to users and to advertisers, the latter who have historically generated more than 90% of the platform’s revenue. X has lost reams of advertisers, and, as a result, about half of its ad revenue since Musk’s takeover in 2022 (tallying $1.25 billion in 2025 compared to $2.43 billion in 2021)—largely over brand safety concerns sparked by Musk’s lax approach to content moderation.
Last spring, Zepeda told ADWEEK’s editor-in-chief Ryan Joe that X planned to roll out a major brand campaign later that year that would position X as the enduring digital town square. That brand campaign never materialized.
Now, X is hyper-focused on ramping up revenue, offering fresh financial incentives to lapsed advertisers, and bringing on a new chief revenue officer, longtime private-equity executive Jon Shulkin.
Neither X nor Zepeda could be reached by press time.
