When Linda Yaccarino announced her departure from X earlier today, it was big news, but hardly a big surprise.
After all, the seasoned NBCU marketing executive had taken on a job that some regarded as all-but impossible. For starters, she was to lead a company that, by changing its name from Twitter to X in 2023, had nullified one of its most recognizable assets.
This was also a company that had shed three-quarters of its workforce, sent its own advertisers packing with its unhinged content, and—not least significantly—remained firmly in the grasp of its inimitably vexatious owner, Elon Musk.
How does an executive lure advertisers back to a platform owned by a man who’d gone on the record saying he “didn’t care” if his inflammatory commentary angered them? Well, apparently, one doesn’t.
We may never know if it was one incident or a collection of them that prompted Yaccarino to pink slip herself, but the record suggests it was probably the latter. In her wake, we take a look at five moments from Yaccarino’s tenure that not only raised eyebrows at the time, but may—in the aggregate—have made her departure inevitable.
Squirmy interview no. 1
On April 18, 2023, just a month before she’d be hired as CEO, Yaccarino interviewed Musk on stage at MMA Global’s Possible conference in Miami. To her credit, Yaccarino wasn’t afraid to hold Musk’s feet to the fire. She told him that advertisers wanted “protection for their ad campaigns”—meaning, assurances that their ads wouldn’t appear next to hate speech.
At first, Musk humored her by touting his new “adjacency controls.” But when Yaccarino suggested that advertisers be allowed to influence Twitter policy, he bit. “That would be wrong,” he said. “That would be very wrong.” It was the first big squirmy moment of Yaccarino’s tenure. There would be more.
The first day that wasn’t
Most companies go out of their way to make new hires feel welcomed when they join, but Yaccarino would not receive that courtesy. After her first day on the job (June 5, 2023), she posted: “It happened—first day on the books!” Unwilling to relinquish the spotlight, however, Musk had scheduled a headline-grabbing even for the same day: a Twitter Spaces talk with vaccine skeptic (and now Health and Human Services Secretary) Robert F. Kennedy.