Elon Musk’s new hire has an impossible job

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Angela Zepeda keeps giving herself impossible challenges. She made it cool to drive Korean budget cars.

Now she’s figuring out how to position X as a place that advertisers and users want to be. As X’s new global head of marketing, Zepeda is stepping in to help rehabilitate the social-media platform’s reputation two years after Elon Musk bought the company then known as Twitter. Since then, many major advertisers have departed or slashed spending, sometimes citing concerns about controversial and offensive content on the platform.

Zepeda’s prior employer, Hyundai, paused advertising on X this spring after an ad from the automaker appeared adjacent to antisemitic and pro-Nazi posts on the site. Hyundai said this week that it hasn’t resumed advertising on the platform. Musk last year told advertisers pulling their ads from X they could “go f—yourself." Musk said in March that X’s advertising and subscription revenues had started rising rapidly, without providing numbers.

X declined to make Zepeda available for an interview. Zepeda has a tight relationship with X Chief Executive Linda Yaccarino, her new boss. They became close when Yaccarino oversaw ad sales at NBCUniversal and Zepeda controlled Hyundai’s hefty ad budget, according to people familiar with the matter.

Hyundai spends hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising in the U.S. every year. Zepeda was a frequent guest at Yaccarino’s annual all-expense paid retreat to the tony Cal-a-Vie Health Spa in Southern California, an event that Yaccarino threw for top female ad buyers and marketers, according to people familiar with the matter.