Linda Yaccarino’s X exit was predictable—and raises more questions than it answers

In an unsurprising turn of events, Linda Yaccarino’s tenure as CEO of X has come to an abrupt end. 

The former NBCUniversal exec’s tenure at the helm of Elon Musk’s social media platform looked destined to fail from the start, as Musk continually undermined her authority as CEO and complicated her already difficult mission (to wit, Musk publicly telling reluctant advertisers to f-off and ditching the Twitter brand, seemingly on a whim). More recently, Musk appears to be cleaning house, with at least 15 senior executives leaving his various companies over the last year. Perhaps the only surprising thing about Yaccarino’s stint at X is that it lasted two years. 

There’s understandable speculation about Yaccarino’s timing, given this week’s fiasco with Musk’s xAI chatbot Grok going full-Nazi (literally referring to itself as “MechaHitler”) on X. Perhaps this was the final straw for Yaccarino, who nonetheless announced her exit with a tweet praising X as “truly a digital town square for all voices and the world’s most powerful culture signal.” (Musk was more terse, sending off his handpicked CEO with a simple “thank you for your contributions”).

Among the many questions swirling in the wake of this all-too-predictable breakup: Who will take Yaccarino’s spot as CEO of Musk’s lighting rod social media platform? One possible answer: nobody. 

Remember that X is now owned by xAI, which acquired the social media platform in March in an all-stock deal, valuing X at $33 billion and xAI at $80 billion. Under xAI, I could imagine a situation where X no longer has a traditional CEO moving forward. Or perhaps, someone within the Musk universe, like Katie Miller, who just joined xAI in cloudy circumstances, or Lightspeed investor Nikita Bier, who joined X as head of product a week ago.

But the bigger question may be what the sordid Yaccarino-MechaHitler episode has to say about the current path that the tech industry is on—both within Elon Inc. and in the industry more broadly. Was Grok’s ugly rampage inevitable when a social media platform becomes a subsidiary of an AI company, and the ad-driven, attention-economy incentives of the latter are fused with the former? Is this the natural endpoint when AI has the ability to publish its “perspective” publicly, with scant oversight (let’s not forget that X gutted its content moderation teams after Musk acquired Twitter)? 

Certainly, this all raises ethical and potentially regulatory questions about what it means for a social media platform to be owned by an AI company, as well as the opposite scenario, such as is the case with Meta, whose “family” of social platforms reach an astounding 3.4 billion people every day. Meta is currently in the process of hiring some of the world’s top AI talent. 

All Grok’s incendiary posts have now been scrubbed from X. And we can only hope Grok hasn’t reached its final form. But we’d better use this opportunity to try to understand how and why this happened—and how to prevent something worse.

ICYMI…Andreessen Horowitz is moving its corporate home from Delaware to Nevada, making a point of announcing the relocation with a blog post criticizing the Delaware Court of Chancery’s treatment of tech founders and their companies. “We could have made this move quietly, but we think it’s important for our stakeholders, and for the broader tech and VC communities, to understand why we’ve reached this decision,” a16z wrote, praising Nevada for having “taken significant steps in establishing a technical, non-ideological forum for resolving business disputes.” Will other VCs and founders follow a16z to the Silver State, as the firm hopes? Let me know what you think—and read the full blog post here.

See you tomorrow,

Allie Garfinkle
X: @agarfinks
Email: alexandra.garfinkle@fortune.com
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