What I do at spaceXai
Aaron Jacobson · leading the small-business growth charter at spaceXai (formerly X)
I lead small-business growth at spaceXai — the company formed when X merged with xAI and was acquired by SpaceX. The charter is a simple one to say and a hard one to do: help the small businesses building on the platform actually get found by their customers.
The mandate
Small businesses are the backbone of a healthy advertising ecosystem, and they’re also the hardest to serve well — limited budgets, limited time, no in-house media team. My job is to build the growth engine that brings more of them onto the platform and helps them succeed once they’re there. That means treating growth as a system rather than a series of campaigns: acquisition, activation, and retention all working together, measured honestly, and improved on a fast loop.
Team of one, full-stack ownership
It’s a lean operation, so I own the whole stack that a bigger org would split across a department:
- Strategy — the growth model, the priorities, and the sequencing of where to push next.
- Content & creative — the messaging and, when needed, the creative that reaches small-business owners where they are.
- Operations — the execution layer that turns a plan into live, running programs.
- Attribution & reporting — the measurement most marketers hand off. I build the dashboards and write the SQL myself, because if you can’t see clearly how growth actually happens, you can’t steer it.
Cross-functional orchestration
None of it moves alone. The real work is getting teams that don’t report to me — ads engineering, data engineering, product, sales, finance, and design — to pull in the same direction, every day. Most of that job is translation: turning a growth goal into something each team can act on, and making sure the wins are theirs too. You don’t orchestrate people by owning them; you do it by being the most reliable, most prepared person in the room and sharing credit relentlessly.
Why the platform is a good place to do it
Part of what makes this work is the platform itself. When news breaks anywhere in the world, people come here to react and make sense of it in real time — so a small business can show up inside the moment its customers care about, not three days later. The audience skews toward founders, decision-makers, and culture-shapers you can’t reliably reach elsewhere. And a public, self-correcting trust layer where the crowd can add context makes it a steadier place to build a brand. Turning all of that into growth for small businesses is the part of the job I don’t take for granted.
The through-line
I’ve built and scaled growth engines across gaming, travel, social, and finance. The lesson I keep relearning is the same: growth at scale is less about clever tactics and more about the system and the teams that move it. Budgets help. Integrity, work ethic, and good partners compound.