Angela Zepeda’s pitch for X: ‘When something big happens, people still come here’

It’s a row that X has since responded to publicly – and one Zepeda addressed with us in a follow-up after the interview, as the fallout became more apparent. But sitting opposite her in Las Vegas, the conversation was broader and more reflective: about culture, about advertisers and about how a platform that has spent much of the past two years under scrutiny is trying to reassert its role.

Zepeda has been in marketing long enough to have seen most versions of the industry, including 12 years agency-side and nearly eight inside the Hyundai ecosystem, moving from agency partner to brand CMO. X is her first media platform role and, by her own admission, it wasn’t part of some grand plan.

“I wish I could tell you there was a master plan, but there wasn’t,” she says. “My career has always been about doors presenting themselves and me taking a leap of faith.”

The leap to X came via a call from Linda Yaccarino, shortly after Elon Musk’s acquisition of the platform and at a moment when advertiser confidence was already fragile. Yaccarino has since departed, but Zepeda joined at a time when the company was acutely aware it needed senior brand marketing leadership.

“Linda said, ‘Leave Hyundai on a high and come and help me do something extraordinary here,’” Zepeda recalls. “And I thought, this is a challenge. A social media platform with huge attention on it and huge potential, that needed to be re-explained.”

Re-explaining X to marketers

That re-explanation has become Zepeda’s core job. Not just persuading advertisers to come back, but articulating what X is actually for in an increasingly fragmented social ecosystem and doing so while navigating lawsuits, public disputes with brands and persistent questions about safety and governance.

“Every platform has a role,” she says. “You go to Instagram for certain things. Facebook for others. Pinterest for others. But when something breaks in culture, people check X. There is no other platform that does that.”

Sport and fandom, in particular, remain central. “On Sundays, people are glued to X because they want to know the scores. Sports, news, entertainment and music are key reasons for users to visit X. Brands that understand that – especially in film, sport and entertainment – understand why they need to be here.”

That case has had to be made against a complicated commercial backdrop. X has been in legal disputes with some advertisers, part of a wider tension over brand safety, moderation and trust following Musk’s takeover. Zepeda doesn’t dwell on the litigation, but she is clear that the business is moving forward.

“96 of our top 100 advertisers are back,” she says. “Are they spending at pre-acquisition levels? No. But they’re getting there.”

Underneath that recovery is a quieter rebuild of the product itself – from creator tools to the feed experience – much of it driven by engineers who are unusually visible to users.

“Our engineers talk directly to users on the platform,” she says. “They explain what’s changing, what might lag, what’s being fixed. People actually like that level of transparency.”

Conversation to commerce – and the increasing importance of AI

Strategically, Zepeda describes her role as unapologetically commercial. “My number one goal is to generate revenue for the company. We exist to support the ad sales team.”

The marketing focus, for now, is largely B2B, helping advertisers understand moments, audiences and behaviors on the platform; though she’s open to eventually doing more consumer-facing brand work.

A big part of the pitch now revolves around what she calls “conversation to commerce,” particularly as X looks to strengthen its creator economy and transactional capabilities.

“We’re great at conversation. That’s where discourse happens all day. But we want to take it to the next level, where people can transact as well.”

That ambition is closely tied to the increasingly tight relationship between X and xAI, following the integration of Grok into the platform – a move that has brought both opportunity and scrutiny.

“Grok is looking at over 100m posts a day to give users a smarter, more personalized feed,” Zepeda told us at CES. “At the same time, it’s using X as a source of real-time information. Those two things working together are incredibly powerful.”

But as recent headlines have underlined, AI at scale brings risk as well as reward. Asked afterwards about concerns around misuse – particularly involving illegal content, including child abuse – X pointed us to a statement posted on its X Safety account, which said:

“We take action against illegal content on X, including Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM), by removing it, permanently suspending accounts, and working with local governments and law enforcement as necessary.

Anyone using or prompting Grok to make illegal content will suffer the same consequences as if they upload illegal content.

For more information on our policies, please refer to our help pages for our full X Rules and range of enforcement options.”

Zepeda had already touched on the broader challenge during our conversation.

“Scale is hard,” she said. “Scale with relevance and guardrails is even harder. But we take brand safety very seriously. We have strong brand suitability scores verified by third parties and a large compliance group within the company.”

If there’s one subject she returns to repeatedly – and one she admits she’s still trying to crack – it’s gender.

“I don’t love giving this answer, because I don’t want it to sound like I’m ‘just for women,’” she says, “but our platform is male-dominated. It’s fandom, sport, news – and that skews male.”

She’s blunt about the opportunity that represents. “Women are huge consumers. They care about social media. Other platforms have figured this out better than we have – Instagram, Pinterest. We haven’t yet found our niche for the things women get excited about.”

That doesn’t mean fundamentally changing X, she’s clear, but it does mean finding the moments and categories where female audiences already exist and amplifying them.

“Fashion, entertainment, shopping – there are places we could do much more. Women still feel like an untapped audience and I’d love to crack that code.”

For a platform often defined by noise, controversy and extremes – and now navigating life under Musk’s direct control – it’s a notably human ambition.

“Sometimes, I feel like mature women aren’t spoken to in the right way,” Zepeda says. “And I’d love to change that – not just for X, but for the industry.”