EXCLUSIVE: X Dangles $200K for Advertisers to Return to the Platform, Leaked Deck Shows

X is imploring advertisers who’ve abandoned the platform to return, promising some a sweetheart deal of up to $200,000 in extra value, according to a leaked pitch deck viewed by ADWEEK. 

On one slide, presented to an ad agency with many clients that have not invested in the platform for a number of months, X suggested it would toss in 50% of added value for every dollar spent, up to $200,000 per advertiser. 

Details of what constitutes “added value”—whether discounts, free ad credits, rebates, or something else entirely—were unspecified.

The incentive was framed as a “return-to-platform incentive” in the slide.

The incentive structure is the same as a promotion X ran last year for Omnicom specifically, though the company’s pitch to the holding company also included additional financial incentives like 15% in media credits for spending on X’s inventory via auction, excluding revenue-sharing products.

The platform ad revenues were roughly halved after Elon Musk’s $44 billion takeover in 2022. Last year, it brought in about $1.25 billion compared to 2021’s $2.43 billion from ads, per Emarketer estimates. Many advertisers dialed back their investments or exited the platform altogether over brand safety concerns posed by X’s lax approach to content moderation and misinformation under Musk’s leadership. 

More than 20 slides of the leaked deck were dedicated to promoting X’s brand safety credentials, transparency practices, and built-in controls for advertisers that help them avoid “sensitive content.” 

In one slide, X explained how Grok—the AI chatbot operated by X’s parent company xAI and integrated natively into X—is being deployed to aid brand safety. “ALL (sic) posts on X are reviewed by xAI’s Frontier model Grok for Brand Suitability,” it read. It also claimed that profile ads will only show up on X profiles that have been “fully vetted by Grok, which evaluates all compliance with X’s Rules and policies and Brand Suitability.” 

The push aligns with a broader pattern for X, which is increasingly positioning Grok as a cornerstone of its brand safety practice, as reported by ADWEEK earlier this month. The push arrives just weeks after Grok users filled X with a deluge of nonconsensual sexualized deepfakes of real users—a scandal that has prompted a handful of regulatory investigations and lawsuits.

In the slides, X also pitched the platform as an ideal advertising environment for high engagement and high performance. It purported to be “#1 for ad attentiveness,” and said X users are 45% more likely to buy products they’ve seen advertised on X compared to non-X users, according to GWI figures from Q2 of 2024 through Q1 of 2025. 

The company also claimed that, per X internal data from August 2 to Dec 7, 2025, the platform observed a 140% lift in click-through rates, a 43% increase in conversion rates, and a 37% increase in sales. 

Ad performance—and ad-linked sales in particular—has been a fixation of Musk’s as the company looks to recover ad revenues. In February of 2023, Musk wrote in a post: “Almost nobody buys anything on Twitter, but almost everyone on Instagram does.”

As recently as this month, Musk posted an interactive survey on X asking users if they’d ever made a purchase based on an ad they’d seen on the platform. Of some 1.6 million responses, 88% they had not.

Have you ever bought anything based on an ad on this platform?

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 9, 2026

X did not provide an on-the-record comment by press time.