Stranger still, Musk used the occasion to stress the hopelessness of the very problems he had hired Yaccarino to fix. “It’s frankly a struggle for Twitter to break even,” he said, adding that “we’ve seen roughly half of our advertising disappear overnight.”

That little ‘f— you’ incident

Smooth and confident, Yaccarino was known as “the velvet hammer” for her ability to manage contentious situations with grace and humor. But no velvet could be smooth enough to conceal the PR disaster that was Musk’s interview at the November 2023 Dealbook Summit. Questioned about companies pulling their ads over Musk’s seeming endorsement of antisemitic content, he blurted: “If someone’s going to try to blackmail me with advertising… go f— yourself.”

In a subsequent memo to X staffers, Yaccarino—her spin machine cranked up to 11—called Musk’s interview “candid and profound. He shared an unmatched and completely unvarnished perspective and vision for the future.”

Squirmy interview no. 2

On Sept. 27, 2023, just 114 days into her job, Yaccarino sat down with CNBC’s senior media and technology correspondent Julia Boorstin at the Code Conference. Just hours beforehand, Yaccarino had learned she’d be following an on-stage session with Yoel Roth. Twitter’s former head of trust and safety had quit a few months earlier after Musk publicly implied that Roth (who is gay) was “in favor of children being able to access adult internet services.”

Musk’s comments had resulted in death threats for Roth, who told the audience that Yaccarino “should be worried” about Musk attacking her, too. By the time Yaccarino took the stage, the tension was palpable. “Yoel and I don’t know each other,” she said icily. “I work at X; he worked at Twitter.”

Enter the Hitler bot

Did Yaccarino have a final straw moment at X? If she did, it likely came as recently as the day before she quit. On July 8, Grok—the chatbot operated by xAI, which owns X—went rogue, declaring itself to be “MechaHitler” and churning out posts that, among other things, posited rape fantasies, referred to the children killed in the recent Texas floods as “future fascists,” and declaring that “the white man stands for innovation.” (Grok had also recently called Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk “a ginger whore.”)

While X scrambled into damage-control mode (“We are aware of recent posts made by Grok and are actively working to remove inappropriate posts”), Yaccarino was just about ready to post a message of her own: “After two incredible years,” she said on July 9, “I’ve decided to step down as CEO of X.”

X did not respond to a request for comment by press time.