New York
CNN
—
Linda Yaccarino is stepping down as CEO of X after two years leading Elon Musk’s social media company.
Yaccarino’s departure comes one day after the company’s Grok chatbot began pushing antisemitic tropes in responses to users. It’s not clear that the events were connected.
Her exit also comes months after Musk sold X, his social media company, to xAI, his artificial intelligence company. The move formally combined the two entities that were already closely intertwined, but raised questions about Yaccarino’s role in the new company going forward.
Yaccarino announced her exit in a post on the platform, saying she is “immensely grateful” to Musk for “entrusting me with the responsibility of protecting free speech, turning the company around, and transforming X into the Everything App.”
“Now, the best is yet to come as X enters a new chapter with @xai,” she said in the post. “I’ll be cheering you all on as you continue to change the world.”
Musk replied to Yaccarino’s post with a terse response: “Thank you for your contributions.”
Yaccarino, a former NBCUniversal marketing executive, took over from Musk as CEO of X — at the time, it was called Twitter — in June of 2023, about eight months after the billionaire bought the social media platform. She was brought on to help fix the platform’s flagging advertising business, after Musk alienated brands with his controversial comments and changes to the platform.
But her tenure has been marked by repeated public relations crises, including scrutiny over antisemitic and other hateful content spreading on the platform, viral false claims around international conflicts and ads that appeared alongside pro-Nazi content on the site. That led some brands to pull their spending, for which the Yaccarino-led X sued an advertising industry group — a lawsuit Yaccarino announced in a video message to all X users, in which she decried what she referred to as a conspiracy to boycott the X platform. (The industry group, Global Alliance for Responsible Media, shut down days after the lawsuit was filed.)
In the years since Musk took over X, the company has also had to contend with a rush of new competitors, including Bluesky and Meta’s Threads.
Yaccarino repeatedly touted the company’s “freedom of speech, not freedom of reach” policy that aims to limit the reach of so-called lawful but awful content on the platform. Under her leadership, X also said it had rolled out additional brand safety controls for advertisers, including the ability to avoid having their ads show next to “targeted hate speech, sexual content, gratuitous gore, excessive profanity, obscenity, spam, drugs.”
But the company’s challenges escalated after X integrated xAI’s Grok chatbot into the platform, where users can ask the AI questions and bring it into conversation threads with other users. In May, Grok erroneously brought up a theory of “white genocide” in South Africa in response to unrelated questions. And on Tuesday — weeks after Musk said he would rebuild the chatbot because he was unsatisfied with some of its replies that he viewed as too politically correct — the chatbot shared antisemitic tropes. In response, xAI said it removed some posts and “has taken action to ban hate speech before Grok posts on X.”
It’s not clear whether Yaccarino, as head of the social media business, had any control over Grok or the company’s other AI operations.
During her time as CEO of X, Yaccarino also faced questions about her power and influence over the company compared to Musk. The billionaire has said he is the company’s chief technology officer, leading product and technology teams, but his controversial statements and seemingly off-the-cuff policy pronouncements often seemed to leave Yaccarino on the back foot.
“Being the CEO of X was always going to be a tough job, and Yaccarino lasted in the role longer than many expected,” Jasmine Enberg, vice president at research firm Emarketer, said in emailed commentary. “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.”
And while X announced on-platform video podcasts with high-profile figures like Khloe Kardashian and several new finance tools, including a partnership with Visa to provide peer-to-peer payments, those features are niche offerings and the platform has not exactly become the “everything app” Yaccarino said she wanted to create.
Use of the platform has also fallen during her tenure, from 915.9 million combined active app users and unique website visitors during the month she took over to just 684.2 million last month, according to web traffic analysis firm Similarweb.
Yaccarino’s exit comes at a complicated time for Musk’s businesses, especially Tesla, and his political involvement has raised questions about his ability and commitment to lead multiple companies. Her departure comes shortly after several high level exits at Tesla, including Omead Afshar, Tesla’s head of manufacturing and operations.
Musk has also recently engaged in a high-profile feud with President Donald Trump, whom he’d previously supported, that has created a rift between Musk-world and Trump-world and prompted threats from the White House against the billionaire’s companies.
This story has been updated with additional details and context.
CNN’s Hadas Gold contributed to this report.
