Elon Musk is helping make LinkedIn cringe more attractive

• LinkedIn might be the most cringe social media network on the internet.
• It turns out cringe also means safe. 
• Brands are attracted to LinkedIn as an ad platform, potentially at the expense of Musk's X.

LinkedIn has always boasted a distinct flavor of cringe.

Remember the marketing startup CEO who posted a selfie of himself crying after laying off two employees? Or the guy who said you shouldn't have empathy for the marketing and sales teams let go in Big Tech's layoff season last year?

But for advertisers, LinkedIn's stream of earnest corpo-speak is proving to be an increasingly hospitable home for their brands — seemingly at the expense of Elon Musk's X.

Ad revenue at LinkedIn jumped by a tenth year on year in 2023 to almost $4 billion, according to data from Insider Intelligence. That's expected to climb another 14.1% to $4.6 billion in 2024.

Meanwhile, ad spend at X dropped by 55% to $1.06 billion last year.

In the grand scheme of things, X has never been the big target for ad spend among brands.

That accolade goes to Google and Meta, which account for almost 50% of US digital ad spend combined, according to Insider Intelligence data. X only accounted for about 1% up till 2022, falling to around 0.4% after Musk's takeover.

Insider Intelligence does predict though that X's share will continue to fall — leaving digital ad market share available to Linkedin, Reddit, Snapchat, and others, even if that share is relatively small.

That's in part because the billionaire has increasingly made X, formerly known as Twitter, a tough place to be for advertisers wanting their brands to be seen in the internet's town square.

Musk's antics, such as propagating an antisemitic post during the Israel-Gaza war, are just one cause for concern. His cull of the company's content moderation team, which is focused on keeping racism, porn, and violence off your feed, is another.

In November, he went on an expletive-led rant against brands such as Apple and Airbnb, who pulled ads from his platform, telling them to "go fuck yourself." Disney boss Bob Iger was particularly in Musk's sights as he spoke.

Amid this chaos, it's little wonder that X has been hemorrhaging money. The company is now valued 71% lower than when Musk initially acquired it, by one major investor, Fidelity.

Meanwhile, marketing executives have noticed the rising demand for advertising space on LinkedIn. One agency executive told the Financial Times last month that prices had jumped roughly 30% since the previous year.

With LinkedIn becoming more of a social network than ever before, and posters mostly sticking to uncontroversial topics such as personal growth and achievement, advertisers can use a unique blend of data about where people work along with what they're interested in personally to target ads.

Musk may have quietly recognized the need to challenge LinkedIn. X is building out a feature that allows users to advertise jobs, much like LinkedIn.

Unfortunately for him, it might be too late.