The drama at X, formerly Twitter, just got juicier. Linda Yaccarino, the high-profile CEO brought in to steady Elon Musk’s ship, has unexpectedly stepped down—sending fresh waves of speculation across Silicon Valley.
Yaccarino, who joined the company in 2023 after a headline-making exit from NBCUniversal, was meant to be the grown-up in the room: a seasoned executive to handle advertisers and operations while Musk chased his “everything app” dream. But less than two years into the job, she’s out—and not many believe it was a quiet exit.
While the official story is that she resigned after helping “transform X into a future-forward platform,” insiders suggest the atmosphere had become “unmanageable” with Musk merging his AI venture, xAI, into the X ecosystem, taking more control, and sparking controversy with erratic decisions and divisive posts.
“It became Elon’s show again,” one industry observer noted. “Linda was trying to run a company. Elon was running a vision board.”
Despite the chaos, Yaccarino did pull off a few wins: advertisers who fled the platform post-Musk’s takeover had started to trickle back, video tools were upgraded, and the platform showed its first projected revenue growth in years. But was it enough?
No successor has been named yet, and all eyes are back on Musk, who never fully left the CEO seat in spirit. The question now is: was this a resignation… or a quiet firing dressed in corporate PR?
Stay tuned—because with Musk, the next headline is always around the corner.