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.
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.
