Elon-appointed X boss Yaccarino resigns. Timing sucks, but sense of inevitability: Dave Lee

Key topics:Yaccarino resigns as X CEO after chaotic tenure under Elon Musk.Grok chatbot turned antisemitic just before her surprise exit.Yaccarino lacked real power, failed to challenge Musk’s toxic actions..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here.The auditorium doors will open for BNIC#2 on 10 September 2025 in Hermanus. For more information and tickets, click here..By Dave Lee.From the start, Linda Yaccarino had been trying to save Elon Musk from himself. It was her “interview” with Musk, where she tried to help him reassure a room full of advertising executives, that set the stage for her to become chief executive officer of Twitter, which then became X. Which then, well … where on Earth do you begin? What matters now for Yaccarino is that the ordeal is over: On Wednesday, she resigned.The timing of her surprise departure coincides with the sudden transformation of X’s artificial-intelligence chat bot Grok into a vicious antisemite. On Tuesday, it was calling itself “MechaHitler,” repeating and reinforcing the kind of tropes that have gotten people killed. It came days after Musk told users unhappy with Grok’s “woke” answers that they would notice a significant difference. They certainly did. “Never a dull moment,” Musk wrote of the furor. (The New York Times reported Wednesday that Yaccarino had discussed leaving the job with colleagues earlier this week before Grok’s outbursts.)Yaccarino, a former NBCUniversal executive, had a surfeit of reasons, both moral and professional, to resign during her two-year tenure. Musk’s torching of one of the world’s most famous brand names on a whim one weekend might have been one of them. Musk’s decision to tell advertisers to “go f--- yourself” might have been another. Maybe that time he did a gesture that drew a resemblance to a Nazi salute was a good time to go. Or, perhaps, the last two times Grok was mysteriously tampered with in ways that made it the leading source of artificial-fascism on the internet. If only there had been some clue it would come to this.Even without the owner’s rap sheet, Yaccarino’s clear absence from important decision-making alone should have been enough of an embarrassment for her to step away long ago. She was a CEO without power or respect. She seemed to have been caught blindsided by the X rebranding. Earlier this year, when Musk announced that X was being “taken over” by his other company, xAI, Yaccarino’s role didn’t even warrant a passing mention..Read more:. The Economist: As Brazil bans Elon Musk’s X, who will speak up for free speech?.Yet while it was mostly Musk making her job difficult, with the kind of carefree destruction reserved only for the world’s richest man, Yaccarino contributed her own errors, too. In interviews, she appeared badly briefed on the actions of her own company. She put her name to the pig-headed move to sue advertisers for not wanting to work with the company. In perhaps the lowest moment of her tenure, she appeared furious and shell-shocked that organizers of the Code 2023 technology conference had dared interview a former (and unhappy) Twitter executive, Yoel Roth, in the session before hers.When Yaccarino’s former colleagues talked among themselves about her move to Twitter, they worried she risked torching an otherwise stellar career. They were right. Restoring her reputation in either the tech or advertising sector will be tough. Yaccarino could have begun clawing back some respect had she used her resignation statement to push back on some of Musk’s actions. She chose not to, perhaps to avoid harming her standing in a MAGA ecosystem that may provide her with her next job.“Thank you for your contributions,” Musk wrote to Yaccarino in a tweet. I’m not sure any of us could list what they were. X is no closer to being the “everything app.” Its user base is about to be usurped by Meta Platforms Inc.’s dull competitor. It’s more toxic for advertisers than ever and losing its political relevance. What had been a role designed to cover Musk’s rotten edges and elevate Yaccarino into a tech CEO instead ended most predictably. When you associate yourself with a troll, the only sure outcome is that you will be dragged down to its level..© 2025 Bloomberg L.P.

Elon-appointed X boss Yaccarino resigns. Timing sucks, but sense of inevitability: Dave Lee

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