Yaccarino’s Efforts to Salvage X’s Advertiser Relationships Ended Up Damaging Her Own: ‘People Hate Her Now’
Artur Widak/AP photo
Linda Yaccarino was supposed to help Elon Musk’s X smooth over its tattered relationships with advertisers, but instead she’s ending her tenure as CEO of The Platform Formerly Known as Twitter with her own reputation in the industry on shaky ground as well, reports Oliver Darcy.
On Wednesday, Yaccarino announced that she was stepping down as CEO of X, a role she took on after 15 years at NBC Universal. The move came a day after the social media platform was once again the focus of a wave of negative press after its AI chatbot Grok delivered a wild spree of unhinged answers praising Adolf Hitler, as well as other antisemitic, graphically sexual, and violent remarks.
In the latest issue of his Status newsletter, Darcy spelled out how Yaccarino getting “X-communicated” was viewed by many as a foregone conclusion, as her relationship with Musk “had been unraveling for some time.” According to Darcy, Yaccarino had spent recent weeks “quietly making the rounds” to catch up with her old friends in the media and advertising worlds for advice on her next steps before she stepped away from X.
Musk “put her on notice last year,” a source told Darcy about Yaccarino losing Musk’s goodwill after repeated failures to win back advertisers’ trust and money and keep her mercurial boss happy. Advertising revenue dropped more than 50% since Musk took over Twitter, reported Darcy, and Yaccarino’s efforts to convey advertisers’ brand safety concerns to Musk irritated him and led to her role being further diminished:
“Elon found a lot of the advertiser requests around brand safety to be tedious at best and Linda became the voice of all that,” Lou Paskalis, a veteran advertising executive with decades of experience and a good friend of Yaccarino, told me Wednesday. “Over time, it created some scar tissue with him. She was advocating [addressing] things that he didn’t want to do, starting with his antics on the platform.”
Indeed, it became unmistakably clear that Yaccarino had fallen out of favor with Musk in March, when his A.I. company, xAI, acquired X, effectively layering over her and making it clear that advertising wasn’t the future of the company. “That was really telling to me,” Paskalis said. “There is no way to see that as something that didn’t limit or constrain Linda’s access to Elon.” In recent weeks, I’m told, there was growing chatter that Yaccarino would be further layered under the xAI reporting structure, sidelining her even more.
Darcy harshly assessed Yaccarino as having “torched her once-sterling reputation in the advertising world to carry water for Musk” and scoffed at her attempts to put a positive spin on her exit from the company. Instead, he wrote, she “shredded” the reputation of someone who was once “widely regarded as one of the most respected advertising executives in the country.”
“[A]fter nearly two years of shilling for Musk and running cover for his attempts to strong-arm advertisers into cutting checks for X, her once-gilded reputation has been nothing short of decimated,” Darcy continued, and quoted a former colleague of Yaccarino’s as telling him, “She’s burned so many bridges, people hate her right now.”
As for Yaccarino’s next steps, Darcy reported that while she “still has deep connections across the media and advertising world, she’s leaving behind a tenure marked by public humiliation.” His sources told him she “will likely spend the summer in Italy before returning in the fall, when she will begin testing the waters to see if anyone is ready to take her call,” to allow time to “at least let the controversy cool before making her next move.”
Read the full report at Status.
