Linda Yaccarino, the TV advertising veteran Elon Musk recruited in 2023 to lead business operations at X, is leaving the company, she announced. She didn’t provide details about why she is departing the social platform.
“After two incredible years, I’ve decided to step down as CEO of X,” she wrote in a post Wednesday morning.
“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,” Yaccarino wrote.
“I’m incredibly proud of the X team — the historic business turn around we have accomplished together has been nothing short of remarkable,” she continued.
Musk wrote in reply to Yaccarino’s resignation notice, “Thank you for your contributions.”
Yaccarino is leaving X after Musk in March 2025 said that his artificial-intelligence company, xAI, acquired X in an all-stock transaction that valued X at $33 billion ($45 billion minus $12 billion in debt) and gave xAI a valuation of $80 billion.
Before signing on the Twitter/X job in 2023, Yaccarino had been the top advertising sales exec at NBCUniversal, where she had worked at the company since 2011. Before joining NBCU, Yaccarino spent 20 years in ad sales and marketing roles at Turner, most recently as EVP/COO of advertising sales, marketing and acquisitions.
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Yaccarino and Musk appeared to be ideologically simpatico, bonding over a range of issues including Musk’s self-described status as a “free speech absolutist.” She is known to hold conservative political views, and during Donald Trump’s first presidential term she served on his council on sports and nutrition. Musk, the world’s richest person, was a major Trump ally before their relationship recently imploded over the tech mogul’s opposition to the president’s congressional spending bill.
However, Yaccarino often found herself doing damage control in the wake of something Musk had said or did — as she fought to convince Madison Avenue that Twitter/X was not a “free-for-all hellscape” (to use Musk’s own terminology in a missive to advertisers in 2022 after he inked a debt-laden deal to buy Twitter). And on more than a few occasions she appeared to be out of the loop about what her boss was thinking.
In announcing her exit from X, Yaccarino said “the best is yet to come as X enters a new chapter with @xai,” referring to X’s integration with Musk’s xAI, which powers the Grok chatbot. But Yaccarino did not mention a new brand-safety controversy that will likely make marketers balk about spending with X: On Tuesday, Grok began spitting out antisemitic comments on X — including referring to itself as “MechaHitler” — after Musk removed so-called “woke filters” on the AI chatbot. (Yaccarino had “discussed her plans to leave with X employees earlier this week” before the Grok antisemitic episode, the New York Times reported.)
X/Twitter went private after Musk’s takeover. But according to Musk, advertising revenue fell sharply after he acquired Twitter and slashed the company’s staff.
Then in November 2023, Musk accused advertisers like Disney who pulled ads from X — over Musk’s support of an antisemitic conspiracy theory — of “blackmail” and told them to “Go fuck yourself.” The next day, Yaccarino noted that Musk had apologized, and she tried to put a forward spin on his aggressive comments, saying that “X is enabling an information independence that’s uncomfortable for some people.” She thanked advertisers who were still spending money with X and praised them as “partners who believe in our meaningful work.” NBCU was among the major advertisers that had frozen spending on X, along with Comcast, Disney, Apple, IBM, Paramount, Warner Bros. Discovery and Lionsgate.
In a bizarre appearance at the Code 2023 conference, Yaccarino defended Musk, asking the crowd rhetorically, “Who wouldn’t want Elon Musk sitting by their side running product?” Speaking before her at the conference was Yoel Roth, formerly Twitter’s head of safety and integrity, who exited after Musk’s takeover and said he has been the target of harassment and death threats after Musk attacked him on Twitter. When moderator Julia Boorstin of CNBC asked Yaccarino about Roth’s comments, Yaccarino responded that she did not know Roth and that the company was not the same place it was when Roth worked there. “I work at X, he worked at Twitter,” Yaccarino said. “It’s a new day at X, and I’ll leave it at that.”
Yaccarino, at the Code conference, also seemed to be unaware that Musk was mulling the possibility of charging a fee to all X users. Boorstin asked Yaccarino whether Musk consulted her before he announced that, to which she replied, “We talk about everything,” but did not answer the question about when X/Twitter might institute a monthly subscription fee for all users of the platform. (X has not widely rolled out a plan to charge all users a fee for posting to the service.)
In August 2024, Musk’s X sued industry trade group World Federation of Advertisers over its Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) initiative, accusing the group of leading a conspiracy among advertisers to “collectively withhold billions of dollars in advertising revenue” from X over concerns about misinformation and hate speech on the platform. (The GARM initiative disbanded following the filing of X’s lawsuit.)
After Omnicom announced an agreement to acquire IPG in December 2024, a lawyer for X called an attorney at Interpublic Group with a message that “Interpublic leaders interpreted” as a suggestion that the merger “could be torpedoed, or at least slowed down, by the Trump administration, given Musk’s powerful role in the federal government” unless IPG spent more ad dollars on X, the Wall Street Journal reported in February. Yaccarino “made comments that seemed like similar warnings in conversations with Interpublic executives,” the Journal reported. Last month, the FTC — comprising three Republicans, including Trump-appointed chairman Andrew Ferguson — approved Omnicom’s $13.5 Billion IPG acquisition with the condition that they are prohibited from boycotting media based on “political or ideological viewpoints.”
From Variety US