X CEO Linda Yaccarino resigns after two years at the helm of Elon Musk's
social media platform
[July 10, 2025] By
MATT O'BRIEN and BARBARA ORTUTAY
X CEO Linda Yaccarino said she’s stepping down after two bumpy years
running Elon Musk’s social media platform.
Yaccarino posted a positive message Wednesday about her tenure at the
company formerly known as Twitter and said “the best is yet to come as X
enters a new chapter with” Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI,
maker of the chatbot Grok. She did not say why she is leaving.
Musk responded to Yaccarino's announcement with his own 5-word statement
on X: “Thank you for your contributions.”
“The only thing that’s surprising about Linda Yaccarino’s resignation is
that it didn’t come sooner,” said Forrester research director Mike
Proulx. “It was clear from the start that she was being set up to fail
by a limited scope as the company’s chief executive.”
In reality, Proulx added, Musk “is and always has been at the helm of X.
And that made Linda X’s CEO in title only, which is a very tough
position to be in, especially for someone of Linda’s talents.”
Musk hired Yaccarino, a veteran ad executive, in May 2023 after buying
Twitter for $44 billion in late 2022 and cutting most of its staff. He
said at the time that Yaccarino’s role would be focused mainly on
running the company’s business operations, leaving him to focus on
product design and new technology. Before announcing her hiring, Musk
said whoever took over as the company’s CEO “ must like pain a lot.”
In accepting the job, Yaccarino was taking on the challenge of getting
big brands back to advertising on the social media platform after months
of upheaval following Musk's takeover. She also had to work in a
supporting role to Musk's outsized persona on and off of X as he
loosened content moderation rules in the name of free speech and
restored accounts previously banned by the social media platform.
“Being the CEO of X was always going to be a tough job, and Yaccarino
lasted in the role longer than many expected. Faced with a mercurial
owner who never fully stepped away from the helm and continued to use
the platform as his personal megaphone, Yaccarino had to try to run the
business while also regularly putting out fires," said Emarketer analyst
Jasmine Enberg.
Yaccarino's future at X became unclear earlier this year after Musk
merged the social media platform with his artificial intelligence
company, xAI. And the advertising issues have not subsided. Since Musk's
takeover, a number of companies had pulled back on ad spending — the
platform’s chief source of revenue — over concerns that Musk’s thinning
of content restrictions was enabling hateful and toxic speech to
flourish.
Most recently, an update to Grok led to a flood of antisemitic
commentary from the chatbot this week that included praise of Adolf
Hitler.
“We are aware of recent posts made by Grok and are actively working to
remove the inappropriate posts,” the Grok account posted on X early
Wednesday, without being more specific.
Some experts have tied Grok's behavior to Musk's deliberate efforts to
mold Grok as an alternative to chatbots he considers too “woke,” such as
OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini. In late June, he invited X users
to help train the chatbot on their commentary in a way that invited a
flood of racist responses and conspiracy theories.
[to top of second column] |
X CEO Linda Yaccarino speaks during a Senate Judiciary Committee
hearing with other social media platform heads on Capitol Hill in
Washington, Wednesday, Jan. 31, 2024, to discuss child safety
online. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh, File)
 “Please reply to this post with
divisive facts for @Grok training,” Musk said in the June 21 post.
“By this I mean things that are politically incorrect, but
nonetheless factually true.”
A similar instruction was later baked into Grok's “prompts” that
instruct it on how to respond, which told the chatbot to “not shy
away from making claims which are politically incorrect, as long as
they are well substantiated.” That part of the instructions was
later deleted.
“To me, this has all the fingerprints of Elon’s involvement,” said
Talia Ringer, a professor of computer science at the University of
Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Yaccarino has not publicly commented on the latest hate speech
controversy. She has, at times, ardently defended Musk's approach,
including in a lawsuit against liberal advocacy group Media Matters
for America over a report that claimed leading advertisers’ posts on
X were appearing alongside neo-Nazi and white nationalist content.
The report led some advertisers to pause their activity on X.
A federal judge last year dismissed X's lawsuit against another
nonprofit, the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which has
documented the increase in hate speech on the site since it was
acquired by Musk.
X is also in an ongoing legal dispute with major advertisers —
including CVS, Mars, Lego, Nestle, Shell and Tyson Foods — over what
it has alleged was a “massive advertiser boycott” that deprived the
company of billions of dollars in revenue and violated antitrust
laws.
Enberg said that, "to a degree, Yaccarino accomplished what she was
hired to do." Emarketer expects X’s ad business to return to growth
in 2025 after more than halving between 2022 and 2023 following
Musk’s takeover.
But, she added, "the reasons for X’s ad recovery are complicated,
and Yaccarino was unable to restore the platform’s reputation among
advertisers.”
Analysts have said that some advertisers may have returned to X to
avoid alienating Trump supporters during the height of Musk's
affiliation with the president and his base. Legal threats may have
also played a part — whether from X or from the Federal Trade
Commission, which is investigating Media Matters over its reporting
that hateful content has increased on X since Musk took over,
resulting in an advertiser exodus. Media Matters has in turn sued
the FTC, claiming it seeks to punish protected speech.
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