Jerod Harris/Getty Images for Vox Media
- Linda Yaccarino stepped down as X's CEO on Wednesday following a two-year tenure.Elon Musk hired her to help revive the social platform's ad business.Instead, she spent a lot of time doing damage control for her boss.
Linda Yaccarino is done cleaning up after Elon Musk.
When she joined the platform formerly known as Twitter in June 2023, investors and ad industry professionals heralded her as a potential savior. The Madison Avenue veteran was tasked with turning around the platform's ad business, which foundered when Elon Musk purchased the company then known as Twitter in 2022.
But within her first couple of months in the top job, her most important responsibility crystallized: She would be a highly visible clean-up crew for Musk.
"It became pretty clear straight away" her main role would be to "try to keep morale going internally," Bruce Daisley, a former Twitter VP who left before Yaccarino joined the company, told Business Insider.
Now, she's exiting what observers describe as a thankless job that involved mending relationships, easing anxieties, and answering to one of the most notoriously challenging leaders in tech.
"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."
A Madison Avenue mainstay goes to Silicon Valley
Yaccarino joined Twitter from NBCUniversal, where she ran the ad business for more than a decade. She was responsible for bringing the entertainment giant into the digital age and gained experience with streaming video. Her NBCUniversal team generated more than $100 billion in ad sales during her tenure, according to her old company profile page.
Yaccarino seemed to embrace Musk's ideas about lax content moderation, which could be seen as risky for advertisers. But advertising's top brass celebrated her Twitter appointment due to her deep relationships on Madison Avenue.
"Yaccarino earned a reputation for strong relationships, indispensable knowledge, and tough negotiation skills," Jay Pattisall, principal analyst at the research firm Forrester, told BI of her tenure at NBCUniversal and before that, Turner Broadcasting. "There was great anticipation that Yaccarino could innovate Twitter/X in that same way."
She would need that experience to fix the chaos Musk had made.
The platform she inherited had been decimated after Musk's takeover. Advertisers had backed away as Musk brought back banned Twitter accounts and loosened content regulation. In December 2022, Musk's second full month at the helm, ad revenue fell 40% compared with December 2021, The Wall Street Journal reported.
"Top on the priority list for advertisers is ensuring brand safety in light of Musk's more relaxed approach to content moderation," Aaron Goldman, CMO of the advertising software company Mediaocean, said when she got the job, adding that it was "welcome news" for advertisers.
Investors seemed equally pleased. Ross Gerber, a longtime Tesla investor who helped Musk acquire what would become known as X, thought her leadership would give Musk more time to focus on Tesla.
He believed "maybe she could get advertisers and actually run the business," he told BI.
She made some headway: She smoothed things over with vendors that Musk had alienated and invested in a live video feature that moved the platform toward Musk's goal of creating an "everything app."
More recently, she oversaw an expansion of X's video products, including an upcoming show hosted by Serena Williams. And while competitors like Meta's Threads have emerged, X's daily user base is 65% larger than Threads and 10 times as large as Bluesky, according to Sensor Tower estimates from the second quarter of 2025.
X declined to comment beyond Yaccarino's public statement on her departure. Yaccarino did not respond to a request for comment.
Clean up on aisle Elon
Two months into her tenure, it started to seem like Musk, not Yaccarino, was ultimately in charge of X. It was Musk who revealed the name change from Twitter to X in mid-2023, a move that rattled advertisers. Musk continued to oversee product design and technology at X, as well, while Yaccarino took care of the business side — raising questions over how much power he was ceding to his CEO.
"Elon is in charge," one X staffer told BI in August 2023.
Yaccarino did little to dispel that image. In a September 2023 interview at Code Conference, she seemed puzzled when asked about Musk's plans to charge all X users and didn't know the platform's number of daily active users.
Musk was not making Yaccarino's job any easier. Advertisers like Disney and IBM fled X in response to a November 2023 report that their ads ran against pro-Nazi posts, and the blowback continued when Musk posted comments that were criticized as antisemitic.
The Tesla chief's response to advertisers? "Go f— yourself."
Yaccarino later sent a memo to staff supporting Musk, calling his remarks to advertisers "candid and profound" and saying he "shared an unmatched and completely unvarnished perspective and vision for the future."
The platform's antagonistic approach toward the community Yaccarino was supposed to appeal to ramped up in the summer of 2024. The company sued a group of major advertisers. Its lawsuit, filed in August, accused advertisers like Mars and Lego of illegally conspiring to boycott the platform through their membership in a now-defunct industry initiative called the Global Alliance for Responsible Media.
The case is ongoing. While advertising insiders and legal experts have dismissed it as baseless, they said it has had a chilling effect on the industry.
"In the world of advertising, the idea that you would sue your biggest advertisers goes beyond a fever dream into something that no one working in advertising would consider to be a plausible plot line," Daisley said.
Some ad agency execs and consultants told BI earlier this year that they were begrudgingly advising clients to spend on X as a kind of insurance policy to avoid an advertiser being singled out as a boycotter, sued, or saddled with regulatory scrutiny.
Ultimately, according to Alex Brownsell, the head of content at the World Advertising Research Center, Yaccarino failed to turn the company's business around.
The World Advertising Research Center estimates that X will generate $1.87 billion in ad revenue this year, down 6.9% from last year.
It estimates that X's ad business shrank by about 23% during Yaccarino's tenure as CEO, compared with a global social ad market that has grown by 34.4% over the same period.
The final straws
Yaccarino repeatedly took the heat over X's stumbles, regardless of any role Musk might have played.
"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.
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's not clear if this played a role in her decision to leave. It may also have been a blessing in disguise.
One mess she won't have to clean up? The fallout from the recent antisemitic rant by xAI's chatbot Grok.
"When you start having antisemitic garbage come out, it scares advertisers away," Gary Black, the cofounder of The Future Fund, who has known Yaccarino for more than a decade, told BI. "It's her nightmare scenario."
