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– X-it. During Linda Yaccarino’s two-year tenure as CEO of X, one question dogged her leadership: how much power did she actually have?
While Yaccarino led the social media platform as CEO, often it seemed the real decision-making came down to owner Elon Musk, who bought what was then Twitter for $44 billion in 2022. Musk was an incredibly active presence on the platform, interacting with users, shifting the algorithm in favor of his content, and giving a sometimes minute-by-minute view into his own opinions about the platform (and American politics). He always made it clear that X was, more than anything else, his.
One analyst, Forrester research director Mike Proulx, put it this way: “It was clear from the start that she was being set up to fail by a limited scope as the company’s chief executive…[In reality, Musk] “is and always has been at the helm of X. And that made Linda X’s CEO in title only, which is a very tough position to be in, especially for someone of Linda’s talents.”
Yaccarino joined in 2023 after a career leading NBCUniversal’s ads business. At the time, Twitter’s ad business was in trouble—and Tesla shareholders worried Musk was too distracted from his supposed main gig, running the automaker. She’s left X’s ads business in a better place than she found it—up 62% year over year as spooked advertisers have slowly returned to the platform, per TechCrunch, although challenges remain.
She said in her announcement (on X, of course) that she’s “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.” She also noted that X has “restored advertiser confidence.”
But ultimately, even as Musk explored his other interests—namely, getting Donald Trump elected president—X was always going to come back to him. The controversial businessman and world’s richest person is hardly known to be hands-off. Earlier this year, Musk demonstrated how intertwined his businesses are; he sold X to xAI, his artificial intelligence startup (which created X’s chatbot Grok). Fifteen senior execs have left X in the past year, my colleague Lila MacLellan reports for Fortune. And Yaccarino acknowledged in her own announcement that “the best is yet to come as X enters a new chapter with xAI.”
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
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