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Linda Yaccarino, the chief executive of X and a top lieutenant to its owner, Elon Musk, said on Wednesday that she was leaving the company two years after joining the social media platform.
In a post to X, Yaccarino, 61, said, “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.”
She did not provide a reason for her departure.
Yaccarino’s exit caps a tumultuous period at X, which has been remade in Mr. Musk’s image since he bought the platform for $44 billion in 2022. Since then, Mr. Musk has shed three-quarters of the company’s employees, loosened speech restrictions on the platform and wielded X as a political megaphone. Advertisers to X were at one point spooked by the changes and the social media company’s ad business declined.
In March, Mr. Musk said he had sold X, which is a privately held company, to xAI, his artificial intelligence start-up, in an unusual arrangement that showed the financial manoeuvring inside his business empire. The all-stock deal valued xAI at $80 billion and X at $33 billion, Mr. Musk said. Since then, xAI has been in talks to raise new financing that could value it at as much as $120 billion.
Top executives regularly come and go at Mr. Musk’s various companies, which include the electric carmaker Tesla and the tunneling company Boring Company. One exception is Gwynne Shotwell, the president of SpaceX, Mr. Musk’s rocket company.
Mr. Musk, who until recently was regularly working in Washington as an adviser to President Trump, brought Yaccarino to X in May 2023 to handle the social media company’s business. She has a background in the media and advertising industry. At the time, the company was known as Twitter.
Immediately upon joining, Yaccarino had her work cut out for her. Mr. Musk quickly made changes that tore up much of the good will Twitter had with users, employees and advertisers, including changing speech policies that allowed noxious content to circulate on the platform. Many advertisers left.
Part of Yaccarino’s mandate, aside from running day-to-day operations at the company, was to repair those broken relationships. She grew close with Mr. Musk early in 2023 when she was an executive at NBCUniversal, and when she pledged to keep running ads on Twitter as other advertisers were refusing to do so. The two began texting regularly, with Mr. Musk ultimately persuading her to run the company.
The other part of her job has been to manage Mr. Musk. Famously impulsive, the billionaire has frequently made her job more difficult, including using expletives to tell advertisers that he would not be changing his ways. He has clashed with foreign governments who have requested takedowns of certain social media accounts. Mr. Musk also erased Twitter’s iconic internet brand by renaming the company X.
Yaccarino has grappled with the challenges and in public social media posts, maintained an upbeat attitude as cheerleader in chief even as Mr. Musk fired off late-night posts that infuriated many users while also galvanizing his supporters.
X gained a second wind last year when Mr. Trump won the election. Some advertisers, courted by Yaccarino, returned to the platform partly because of Mr. Musk’s adjacency to the president. Yaccarino has said that more than 96% of X’s previous top brand advertisers have returned to spending money there during her tenure.
Info source: New York Times