Linda Yaccarino has announced that she is stepping down as the CEO of Elon Musk’s X after two years at the helm of the social media platform, previously known as Twitter.
Announcing her exit Wednesday morning, July 9, Yaccarino wrote, “When @elonmusk 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. I’m incredibly proud of the X team – the historic business turn around we have accomplished together has been nothing short of remarkable.”
Before joining X, Yaccarino had spent several decades working in advertising and marketing, most notably serving as chairwoman of global advertising and partnerships at NBCUniversal from 2011 to 2023. She left that post to join X, brought in to oversee the arguably impossible task of injecting some kind of stability into the social media platform, and stem the exodus of major advertisers, after Musk purchased it in 2022.
Stability, however, was hard to come by as old Twitter guardrails were cast aside and X quickly flooded with bots, misinformation, and offensive posts (some from Musk himself). It is, in its way, a fitting cap to Yaccarino’s tenure that she announced her resignation the day after Grok — the chatbot developed by Musk’s AI start-up xAI, which purchased X in March — suddenly began spewing hate speech about Jewish people and publicly identified itself as “MechaHitler.”
“Now, the best is yet to come as X enters a new chapter with @xai,” Yaccarino wrote in her resignation post. (According to The New York Times, Yaccarino had discussed her plans to leave with X employees earlier this week.)
Along with trying to steer the X ship, Yaccarino spent some of her time at X pushing Congress to pass online child safety bills. She also helped spearhead a lawsuit against former advertisers, who’d pulled their spending from the platform. The litigation was largely successful, even prompting the Federal Trade Commission to investigate whether advertising and advocacy groups improperly used their influence to get marketers and agencies to boycott X.
A replacement for Yaccarino has yet to be announced.
