Linda Yaccarino's two years at X were about restabilising a platform in crisis

Economic Times

3 days ago

Shortly after Elon Musk bought Twitter and overhauled the microblogging site into a more politicised platform X, he roped in Linda Yaccarino to head its business operations while he focussed on product and technology.
She stepped down from this role on July 9 after a little over two years in the role. This comes days after Grok, the chatbot created by Musk's xAI, was embroiled in controversy around its antisemitic comments.
This is only the last of a series of controversies Yaccarino waded through during her time at Musk's social media platform.
Time of crisis When she joined the recently rebranded X, it was undergoing a major policy shift under Musk's leadership. It was going from a social media app to an "everything app", on track to integrate audio-video calls, job search and long-form texts.It was also facing a drop in global usage and a fall in advertising revenue, mainly driven by controversial statements made by Musk. Many brands threatened to (and some did) pull ads from the platform due to concerns over content moderation and brand safety.
On the cusp of the generative AI (GenAI) boom, the platform, like other social media platforms, was riddled with misinformation and scrambling to deal with it. Musk had also gotten rid of legacy Twitter features, with profile verification turned into a subscription service. Musk was also in the headlines for suspending journalist accounts, hurting sentiment among brands, and garnering advertiser distrust.
What Yaccarino was bringing to the table When he hired Yaccarino, Musk said her strong background in advertising from her time at NBCUniversal, would help prop up what had become a shaky future for X's ad sales. But soon after she took the reins, Musk made matters more difficult for her, publicly rebuking advertisers for boycotting X, telling them to f**k off.She embraced Musk's vision of the "everything app". Under her leadership, X focussed on developing new product offerings such as Community Notes, a user-driven fact-checking feature, and X Money, a financial services initiative slated to launch soon.Yaccarino did not disclose her next move but indicated she will continue to engage with the platform's community. 'I'll be cheering you all on as you continue to change the world,' she wrote. 'As always, I'll see you on X.'