Linda Yaccarino Steps Down as CEO After Two Years Leading Elon Musk’s Social Media Platform

NEW YORK — X CEO Linda Yaccarino said she’s stepping down after two years running Elon Musk’s social media platform.

On Wednesday, Yaccarino shared an upbeat message regarding her time at the company previously known as Twitter, expressing anticipation for the future as X begins a new era with Musk’s AI firm xAI, the creator of the Grok chatbot.

“Thank you for your contributions,” Musk wrote on X in response to Yaccarino’s announcement.

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.

At that moment, it was stated that Yaccarino’s duties would mostly involve managing the company’s business operations, allowing Musk to concentrate on product development and innovative technology.

By accepting the position, Yaccarino embraced the task of encouraging major brands to resume advertising on the social media platform after a period of disruption following Musk’s acquisition.

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.

Two years later, those concerns have not subsided. A recent 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.

“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.