Linda Yaccarino, the former NBCUniversal executive who agreed to run Elon Musk’s X platform, is stepping down after about two years on the job, announcing her departure from the CEO role after a disastrous day for the platform’s artificial intelligence bot.
The bot, called Grok, went on a shockingly antisemitic rant Tuesday wherein it heaped praise on Adolf Hitler. Grok began calling itself a digital version of the Nazi dictator before humans working for the platform intervened; Grok finally admitted it fell hard for a hoax.
On Wednesday, Yaccarino posted a departure note to X.
“I’m incredibly proud of the X team — the historic business turn around we have accomplished together has been nothing short of remarkable,” she said.
With her advertising and marketing experience, she had been charged with turning around the platform’s advertising business. Advertisers fled the site after Musk took over Twitter in 2022 and began implementing controversial changes that elevated right-wing conspiratorial and racist content.
Yaccarino recalled her first discussions with Musk about what the CEO role would entail.
“I knew it would be the opportunity of a lifetime to carry out the extraordinary mission of this company,” she wrote Wednesday. “I’m immensely grateful to [Musk] for entrusting me with the responsibility of protecting free speech, turning the company around, and transforming X into the Everything App.”
While she did not mention the Grok debacle, she did include a shoutout to xAI, which oversees the bot, writing that its work means “now the best is yet to come.”
“I’ll be cheering you all on as you continue to change the world,” Yaccarino said.
Musk posted a short reply: “Thank you for your contributions.”
Yaccarino’s tenure at X was marked by chaos.
She was often in the unenviable position of standing behind Musk as he made outrageous comments both online and offline.
When Musk shared a vulgar message for advertisers threatening to pull their spending from the platform — “go fuck yourself” — Yaccarino stepped in to attempt to clean up the mess.
“X is enabling an information independence that’s uncomfortable for some people,” she wrote at the time.
Yaccarino also defended Musk at another point, when he amplified an antisemitic post about Israel’s war in Gaza.
In that post, an X user accused Jewish people of “pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them.” Musk commented, “You have said the actual truth.”
Grok yammered on in a similar fashion Tuesday, linking a Jewish-sounding last name to anti-white hatred.
Through Yaccarino’s years at X, her former NBCUniversal colleagues were reportedly left baffled. Two of them pointed to Yaccarino’s ego when speaking anonymously to The Hollywood Reporter in 2023.
As one person told the outlet: “She let her ego get the best of her. She thought she could control [Musk]. It was a level of ego and hubris that you rarely see.”