Linda Yaccarino said Wednesday that she will step down as CEO of X, the social media platform owned by Elon Musk. The announcement comes just a day after X’s Grok chatbot released a wave of antisemitic posts.
In a post on the platform, Yaccarino did not explain the reason for her departure, or address the controversy around the antisemitic content from Grok, but said she was proud of the work the company had done to turn around its business.
“We started with the critical early work necessary to prioritize the safety of our users — especially children, and to restore advertiser confidence,” she wrote. “This team has worked relentlessly from groundbreaking innovations like Community Notes, and, soon, X Money to bringing the most iconic voices and content to the platform. Now, the best is yet to come as X enters a new chapter with @xai.”
Yaccarino’s departure was in the works for over a week, a source familiar with the situation told NBC News.
Yaccarino joined the company in May 2023, when it was still called Twitter, serving as the first chief executive after Musk bought it. Before that, she had been head of ad sales for NBCUniversal, the parent company of NBC News. Later that year, she told CNBC that her role was to focus on the business side of X.
“Elon works on the technology and dreams up what’s next,” she said. “I bring it to market.”
Almost two years later, it’s unclear how much Yaccarino was able to accomplish. Efforts to make X the “everything app” have showed few signs of materializing, while it has moved to embrace artificial intelligence technology, most notably the chatbot Grok. Musk’s AI startup, xAI, acquired X in March in a deal that valued the social media platform at $33 billion.
Grok has been broadly embraced by users as a way to add context and fact checking to posts, but recently has encountered issues with its output. Most notably, Grok stopped responding to user requests Tuesday after it began to churn out antisemitic posts days after an update.
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