Linda Yaccarino is stepping down from her role as CEO of X, Elon Musk’s social media platform.
Her departure follows a wave of backlash against Grok, the artificial intelligence chatbot that operates through X posts, which recently received criticism for spewing antisemitic messages and other offensive rhetoric. Yaccarino has not confirmed that these recent controversies contributed to her resignation.
Yaccarino’s farewell and Musk’s response
Yaccarino announced her departure on X, saying that she is “immensely grateful” to her billionaire ex-boss for taking her on in 2023, and that she is “incredibly proud” of her team that achieved a “historic business turn around.”
She did not provide a reason for her decision to leave, and Musk thanked Yaccarino for her contributions.
Some of Yaccarino’s achievements
In her farewell post, Yaccarino referred to the work she’d done to protect children on X, such as campaigning for online child safety bills and introducing Community Notes, where users can collaboratively add context or corrections to potentially misleading posts.
She said that her team had also worked on X Money, an upcoming payment system to be built into the platform, and added that “the best is yet to come” with further integrations from xAI.
Helping ‘restore advertiser confidence’
The former ad executive for NBCUniversal said one of her achievements in her tenure was helping to “restore advertiser confidence.”
When Musk bought X, then known as Twitter, for $44 billion in 2022, some of his first actions were to relax safety policies, fire most of the moderators and trust team, and restore banned accounts in the name of “freedom of speech.” This led to a notable rise in hate speech and controversial content, prompting many major advertisers to withdraw their campaigns due to concerns over brand safety.
However, X has bounced back somewhat since then, partly due to its AI associations with Grok and Musk’s AI company xAI, and partly due to its improved profit margins. Yaccarino led the charge against major brands that had paused advertising, accusing them of participating in a coordinated boycott that harmed the platform’s business.
Some advertisers returned to the platform after US President Donald Trump won the election, as Musk and he have formed a close, yet volatile, relationship. Yaccarino claims that 96% of advertisers returned to X in the two years after she joined.
Fidelity valued its X stake at $13.30 million in February 2025, and the platform re-obtained its $44 billion valuation when it was acquired by xAI the following month. According to eMarketer, X is set to grow its global ad revenue for the first time since 2021 this year, by 16.5%.
A shifting platform and the rise of xAI
xAI has been a source of headaches for X of late, with its chatbot Grok spewing antisemitic rhetoric, praising Hitler, making references to “white genocide” in South Africa, identifying Musk as a “top misinformation spreader,” and stating that the president deserved the death penalty.
As Grok is trained on X’s content, and Musk removed many of the content moderation policies when he bought the platform, these issues shouldn’t come as a huge surprise.
The Grok-related controversies weren’t necessarily Yaccarino’s final straw. In fact, during her tenure as CEO, she faced numerous challenges, many of which stemmed from Musk’s decisions. She managed to rebuild advertiser trust even after Musk fired expletives at major brands and scrapped the iconic Twitter identity by rebranding the platform as X.
However, Lou Paskalis, the CEO of advertising consultancy AJL Advisory and a friend of Yaccarino, said that her exit was inevitable after X was brought closer with xAI.
“While she got a lot of advertisers back on the platform through her tenacity, they did not return to their previous levels of spending, and that was very unlikely with Elon behaving the way he did,” he told The New York Times.
Even though Grok might have cost him X’s CEO, Musk is doubling down on his AI ambitions, pushing to partner with OpenAI in the UAE, even as Sam Altman sues him for harassment.
