Linda Yaccarino said Wednesday she is stepping down after two tumultuous years as CEO of X – a job made more complicated by Elon Musk’s recent public feud with President Trump and his increased focus on artificial intelligence.
“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,” Yaccarino wrote in an X post. “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.”
The former NBCUniversal advertising executive did not detail the reasons for her exit.
Linda Yaccarino announced her exit as X CEO on Wednesday. AFP via Getty Images
The departure was announced just hours after X was forced to disable text responses from its “Grok” AI chatbot after it began referring to itself as “Mecha-Hitler” and espousing pro-Nazi views.
One source close to the situation told The Post that Yaccarino’s exit was in the works for over a week and was not related to the Grok meltdown.
“She got advertisers back and made it profitable again,” the source said. “Felt it was time to move on.”
Musk gave Yaccarino a curt sendoff.
“Thank you for your contributions,” he wrote on X about an hour after her announcement.
Yaccarino, 61, had recently clashed with Reza Banki, who was hired as X’s chief financial officer late last year and had pressured her about the company’s spending, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter.
Her son Matt Madrazo, an ad sales employee at X, showed up to work at the company’s New York office on Wednesday despite his mother’s resignation.
Elon Musk and Yaccarino in April 2023, a month before she was hired. AP
“So that’s awkward,” Madrazo quipped, according to the New York Times.
Yaccarino was brought on board in 2023 and tasked with repairing X’s relationship with the advertising industry – which fled the platform in droves due to concerns about Musk’s move to ease content moderation practices after buying the site formerly known as Twitter for $44 billion in 2022.
Musk slashed about three-fourths of the company’s workforce since the acquisition. In March, he merged X with his artificial intelligence startup, xAI, which is responsible for building Grok.
The merger valued X at $33 billion and xAI at $80 billion – and prompted some speculation about Yaccarino’s future at the combined entity.
The difference in valuations was a clear signal that xAI was viewed as more valuable to investors than Musk’s X, which is more volatile due to its reliance on ad revenue.
Yaccarino was a vocal defender of Musk throughout her tenure – even publicly backing his decision to join the Trump administration as part of the Department of Government Efficiency. REUTERS
Yaccarino was a vocal defender of Musk throughout her tenure – even publicly backing his decision to join the Trump administration as part of the Department of Government Efficiency.
When Musk lashed out and told advertisers who left X to “go f— yourself” in November 2023, Yaccarino jumped in to soften the blow, writing that he had expressed an “explicit point of view about our position.”
She also took a brute force approach toward ad “brand safety” firms that Musk accused of organizing a boycott that steered ad dollars away from X.
Under Yaccarino’s leadership, X filed a federal antitrust lawsuit targeting the World Federation of Advertisers and a shadowy ad cabal known as the “Global Alliance for Responsible Media initiative,” or GARM.
X accused the WFA and GARM of coordinating a boycott that cost the site “billions of dollars in advertising revenue” under the guise of brand safety. Soon after the lawsuit was filed, GARM ceased operations entirely, citing escalating legal costs.
“GARM was just a symptom, but [finding] the root cause of the entire ecosystem being broken, that’s what the suit is about,” Yaccarino said in an interview with The Post last August.
Yaccarino made major progress in rebuilding ad revenue streams and had said that 96% of X’s top advertisers had resumed spending on the platform during her tenure. The company has doubled its profit since 2021.
X benefitted from Musk’s close ties to Trump, which prompted some corporate advertisers to resume spending. Meanwhile, the Trump administration and the FTC cracked down on ad boycotts – even going as far as to stipulate that ad giants Omnicon and Interpublic could only merge if they agreed not to steer spending based on a site’s political stance.
However, Musk and Trump had a public falling-out following disagreements over the White House-backed Big Beautiful Bill – culminating in the billionaire’s latest move to form the “America Party” to challenge Republican and Democratic dominance of the US political system.
Musk’s volatile behavior has raised questions as to whether Trump and his allies will continue lending support to the X owner’s preferred causes, including the crackdown on corporate ad boycotts.