Yesterday’s breaking news about my onetime peer Linda Yaccarino was as surprising but arguably inevitable. Everyone eventually leaves a job, and ideally it’s on one’s own timeline. The ASSOCIATED PRESS’ Matt O’Brien and Barbara Ortutay supplied the basics:
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.”
And that five-word muttering alone should tell you what side of this divorce I net out on. That’s as robotic and tone-deaf as any parting words I’ve heard or seen from a top executive in my many years, and that includes the ones I’m still waiting for from my most recent boss when I saw him happily responding to birth announcements while he traveled across Europe on Sony’s dime and never gave me the courtesy of even a reply to my note that I was spending Christmas break recovering from an illness that nearly killed me.
I’ve made it quite clear I’m a fan of Yaccarino’s; heck, any forensic accounting of this site would reveal that. We’ve mused about her X-periences 0n several occasions, starting with when she bolted NBCUniversal just before the 2023 upfronts that she designed the strategy for to take on the task of running what was then known as Twitter. We made note of how her job quickly became even more challenged than she may have bargained for on two separate occasions several months later, including one musing around the holidays which turned out to be eerily prescient of the other newsworthy event in the Land of Musk that broke yesterday, again per the AP duo:
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. “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.
Yet less than a year ago Yaccarino was ever the diligent employee; using the same sort of persuasive defense of the otherwise indefensible she used to sell spots in Oxygen originals to try and help X gain what she believed was a fair share of business. This was roughly around the time when Elon starting baring his belly and dealing head-on with his Daddy issues with a guy who was dealing with his own near-death experience.
But in a Wednesday morning quarterbacking post-mortem that no less than four BUSINESS INSIDER reporters (Madeline Berg,Lucia Moses,Lara O’Reilly andSarah E. Needleman) contributed to, as it turned out while this was going on her boss was undermining her more and more:
Late last year, Musk hired Mamhoud Reza Banki as X’s CFO, a move that seemed to undercut Yaccarino and the finance head she’d appointed, The Wall Street Journal reported. In March, Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI acquired X in an all-stock transaction. That effectively left Yaccarino as a division head.
“It must have been hell for her as well because she was so clearly unempowered and not in control — from a public point of view, it was quite humiliating,” an advertising agency veteran told BI. Her political handling of tense situations with the ad business didn’t help her case with marketers either, this person said.
Add to that this observation which the AP duo reported:
“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.”
That’s a nuanced observation from someone who’s dealt with Linda directly and comes from a place of both sanity and facts being front and center. A vastly different place from where a ketamine-addicted man-child who empowers colleagues less than half his age with names like Big Balls comes from.
Which is why when I see snarks from folks that are now castigating Yaccarino for ever becoming a part of this mess, praying she never works another minute in this business, I get particularly defensive and even angry. Yes, she was paid quite handsomely for her troubles, by all accounts, this stint or two years and changed netted her and her family in the neighborhood of $40 million. That’s an ROI her clients would kill for. And that’s also more than enough FU money for her to raise her middle finger to those snarkers–as the BI quartet noted:
“She always made it clear she would walk away when the time was right,” a friend of Yaccarino’s told BI. “She made enough money that she doesn’t need to work.”
Let me ask anyone who claims to be so high-minded and moral: What might you consider doing for $40 million if you actually were staring at that number in a contract awaiting your DocuSign? I know what a few good friends of mine have done for a lot less. I know what I did for something in between Dealing with an asshole in any way, shape or form does have a price.
I, for one, hope after a summer away from the spotlight–perhaps a getaway to a remote country where Starlink isn’t available–that Yakko resurfaces somewhere. I’ve taken note of the fact that her old boss Jeff Shell is quickly assembling a team ready to take on the challenge of attempting to restore Paramount Global to relative glory. THE ANKLER’s Lesley Goldberg dropped a wonderful piece yesterday about how one-time Netflix content czar Cindy Holland has quietly resurfaced in an advisory role to him and the Ellisons. Considering Yaccarino’s own level of past success, let alone in the cesspool-like cauldron she most recently toiled in, bringing back advertisers pissed off at Shari Redstone’s decision-making would be mere child’s play compared to what she was able to accomplish for Musk.
But whatever does happen next, more power to Yakko for being able to regain control of her own path and narrative. And FWIW know that I’m ready to start musing about it if and when.
Until next time…