Linda Yaccarino said she would step down from her role as CEO of Elon Musk’s X after a two-year tenure marred by controversy, including a new spree of antisemitic comments by X’s AI chatbot Grok.
She became the social-media company’s CEO in June 2023 and had been negotiating her exit for more than a week, according to NBC News.
“After two incredible years, I’ve decided to step down as CEO of X,” Yaccarino wrote on the platform on Wednesday. “When [Elon Musk] and I first spoke of his vision for X, I knew it would be the opportunity of a lifetime to carry out the extraordinary mission of this company. I’m immensely grateful to him for entrusting me with the responsibility of protecting free speech, turning the company around, and transforming X into the Everything App.”
Musk issued a brief and dismissive reply on X, though he offered no comment on who would succeed her.
“Thank you for your contributions,” he wrote.
Musk’s AI chatbot Grok made a series of Adolf Hitler-praising comments on Tuesday, including saying the Nazi leader would be the best person to deal with “anti-white” posts that appeared to make light of those who died during flash floods in Texas. The chatbot was later disabled from responding to public user questions.
Yaccarino did not respond to an immediate request for comment. X did not respond to an immediate request for comment.
Musk lured Yaccarino to X, then still known as Twitter, in May 2023 from her role NBCUniversal’s head of ad sales to focus “primarily on business operations, while I focus on product design & new technology.”
“Looking forward to working with Linda to transform this platform into X, the everything app,” he wrote at the time.
Her two years in the role seem to offer mixed success. Yaccarino did lead the company through its rebrand as X, and the company has seen advertisers return to the platform after a mass exodus following Musk’s takeover in 2022.
But Yaccarino has also had to navigate Musk’s temperamental engagement with the platform. Musk canceled a contract with anchor Don Lemon last year she helped broker after a contentious interview that examined his drug use. Lemon eventually sued the platform.
She also often had to play clean-up after Musk’s pledge to make X a free-speech platform often led to hate speech propagating the site. She met with top X advertisers including Vogue‘s Anna Wintour, the chief content officer at Condé Nast, and the Anti-Defamation League’s Jonathan Greenblatt in 2023 to keep the companies on the platform, according to The New York Times.
The advertising return did not always come amicably. Yaccarino announced last year that X would sue an ad industry group, the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, over allegations the group conspired to boycott ads on the platform.
The costly lawsuit led the group to shut down. X also sued the Center for Countering Digital Hate and the media monitoring group Media Matters for America. The lawsuit against CCDH was dismissed, while Media Matters counter-sued X earlier this year.
She has had breaks with Musk before. After Musk repeatedly engaged with antisemitic conspiracy theories on X and told advertisers refusing to engage with the platform to “go f--- yourself” at the Times' DealBook Summit in 2023, Yaccarino called Musk and told him his comments wouldn’t help lure advertisers back, according to the Times.
“Linda was set up to fail by his own behavior from she got hired,” Lou Paskalis, the CEO of AJL Advisory, a strategic marketing consultancy, and Yaccarino’s friend, told the Daily Beast. “Was she the best person that she could have put in that job? Absolutely. Did she have a chance of achieving what he thought the platform could do from an ad revenue standpoint? No. Was he the cause of that? Yes."
Paskalis said Yaccarino’s exit likely stemmed from Musk’s decision earlier this year to have his xAI startup purchase X for $33 billion, effectively layering her and signaling his desire to pivot away from advertising toward a tech-focused subscription model. xAI raised $10 billion this year to support Musk’s AI ambitions, according to CNBC.
Still, she remained supportive of Musk’s X in her departure post, praising its future under the billionaire’s xAI.
“X is truly a digital town square for all voices and the world’s most powerful culture signal,” she wrote on Wednesday. “We couldn’t have achieved that without the support of our users, business partners, and the most innovative team in the world. I’ll be cheering you all on as you continue to change the world.”
Paskalis didn’t think Grok’s antisemitic tantrum played as much of a role, speculating her exit had been in the works before Tuesday’s episode and calling the timing “coincidental.”
He also doesn’t see Yaccarino publicly bashing Musk—regardless of whether the eccentric, terse billionaire maintains the same restraint—and described her as a “saavy cat” in how she’s navigated Musk’s outbursts.
“Linda is too professional of an operative to get sucked into that, he said. ”I think that she will only say nice things about him, and I think he will only say nice things about her, and if one of them slips from that path, I think you’re going to be in Armageddon."
