X CEO Linda Yaccarino said sheโs stepping down after two bumpy years running Elon Muskโs social media platform.
Yaccarino posted a positive message Wednesday about her tenure at the company formerly known as Twitter and said โthe best is yet to come as X enters a new chapter withโ Muskโs artificial intelligence company xAI, maker of the chatbot Grok. She did not say why she is leaving.
Musk responded to Yaccarino’s announcement with his own 5-word statement on X: โThank you for your contributions.โ
โThe only thing thatโs surprising about Linda Yaccarinoโs resignation is that it didnโt come sooner,โ said Forrester research director Mike Proulx. โIt was clear from the start that she was being set up to fail by a limited scope as the companyโs chief executive.โ
In reality, Proulx added, Musk โis and always has been at the helm of X. And that made Linda Xโs CEO in title only, which is a very tough position to be in, especially for someone of Lindaโs talents.โ
Musk hired Yaccarino, a veteran ad executive, in May 2023 afterย buying Twitter for $44 billionย in late 2022 and cutting most of its staff. He said at the time that Yaccarinoโs role would be focused mainly on running the companyโs business operations, leaving him toย focus on product design and new technology.ย Before announcing her hiring, Musk said whoever took over as the companyโs CEO โย must like pain a lot.โ
In accepting the job, Yaccarino wasย taking on the challengeย of getting big brands back to advertising on the social media platform after months of upheaval following Musk’s takeover. She also had to work in a supporting role to Musk’s outsized persona on and off of X as he loosened content moderation rules in the name of free speech and restored accounts previously banned by the social media platform.
โBeing the CEO of X was always going to be a tough job, and Yaccarino lasted in the role longer than many expected. Faced with a mercurial owner who never fully stepped away from the helm and continued to use the platform as his personal megaphone, Yaccarino had to try to run the business while also regularly putting out fires,” said Emarketer analyst Jasmine Enberg.
Yaccarino’s future at X became unclear earlier this year after Muskย merged the social media platformย with his artificial intelligence company, xAI. And the advertising issues have not subsided. Since Musk’s takeover, a number of companies had pulled back on ad spending โ the platformโs chief source of revenue โ over concerns that Muskโs thinning of content restrictions was enabling hateful and toxic speech to flourish.
Most recently, an update to Grok led to aย flood of antisemitic commentaryย from the chatbot this week that included praise of Adolf Hitler.
โWe are aware of recent posts made by Grok and are actively working to remove the inappropriate posts,โ the Grok account posted on X early Wednesday, without being more specific.
Some experts have tied Grok’s behavior to Musk’s deliberate efforts to mold Grok as an alternative to chatbots he considers too โwoke,โ such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini. In late June, he invited X users to help train the chatbot on their commentary in a way that invited a flood of racist responses and conspiracy theories.
โPlease reply to this post with divisive facts forย @Grokย training,โ Musk said in the June 21 post. โBy this I mean things that are politically incorrect, but nonetheless factually true.โ
A similar instruction was later baked into Grok’s โpromptsโ that instruct it on how to respond, which told the chatbot to โnot shy away from making claims which are politically incorrect, as long as they are well substantiated.โ That part of the instructions was later deleted.
โTo me, this has all the fingerprints of Elonโs involvement,โ said Talia Ringer, a professor of computer science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Yaccarino has not publicly commented on the latest hate speech controversy. She has, at times, ardently defended Musk’s approach, including in a lawsuit against liberal advocacy group Media Matters for America over a report that claimed leading advertisersโ posts on X were appearing alongside neo-Nazi and white nationalist content. The report led some advertisers to pause their activity on X.
A federal judge last year dismissed X’s lawsuit against another nonprofit, the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which has documented theย increase in hate speechย on the site since it was acquired by Musk.
X is also in an ongoing legal dispute with major advertisers โ including CVS, Mars, Lego, Nestle, Shell and Tyson Foods โ over what it has alleged was a โmassive advertiser boycottโ that deprived the company of billions of dollars in revenue and violated antitrust laws.
Enberg said that, “to a degree, Yaccarino accomplished what she was hired to do.” Emarketer expects Xโs ad business to return to growth in 2025 after more than halving between 2022 and 2023 following Muskโs takeover.
But, she added, “the reasons for Xโs ad recovery are complicated, and Yaccarino was unable to restore the platformโs reputation among advertisers.โ
Analysts have said that some advertisers may have returned to X to avoid alienating Trump supporters during the height of Musk’s affiliation with the president and his base. Legal threats may have also played a part โ whether from X or from the Federal Trade Commission, which is investigating Media Matters over its reporting that hateful content has increased on X since Musk took over, resulting in an advertiser exodus. Media Matters has in turn sued the FTC, claiming it seeks to punish protected speech.
