Linda Yaccarino Ducks Out of X’s New Grok Era

And now her watch has ended.

Just over two years after taking the job, X (formerly Twitter) CEO Linda Yaccarino on Wednesday announced she’d be stepping down from her role, effective immediately. Yaccarino was tasked with luring back fleeing ad clients, and arguably succeeded. Perhaps not-so-coincidentally, the challenge of keeping those clients happy got a lot more complicated this week after the company’s AI chatbot, Grok, underwent a personality change.

Grok Squak

It’s been a busy two years for X, culminating in an especially busy past few months. That’s because in March, the platform merged with owner Elon Musk’s other tech venture, xAI, which had already been supplying Grok support to X users. The all-stock acquisition valued X at $33 billion — a healthy notch down from the $44 billion Musk spent to buy the platform in 2022, although above the implied valuation of just $9.4 billion that investor Fidelity estimated the company was worth back in October. The merger also placed xAI’s valuation at $80 billion, even as it burns through cash almost faster than it can raise it.

Still, Yaccarino is declaring her mission accomplished. Last month, the outgoing CEO told the Financial Times that 96% of the platform’s pre-Elon Musk acquisition ad clients had returned, and that X would succeed in its goal of reaching 2022 levels of advertising “super soon.”

Whether the prediction comes true may depend on your definition of the words “super” and “soon” — especially now that advertisers have renewed reason to fear for their brand safety when swimming in X’s content stream:

• According to research firm eMarketer, X is expected to see its revenue increase to $2.3 billion this year. That’s up from $1.9 billion last year but still quite a way from the $4.1 billion annual mark the company reached before Musk turned down the content-moderation dials.
• Speaking of dial-turning: Chatbot Grok earlier this week went on an antisemitic and hate-speech-filled posting spree on its “personal” X account, at one point even referring to itself as “Mecha Hitler.” The posts came after Musk announced on Friday that the chatbot had received an update to improve it “significantly,” with the chatbot’s publicly available system prompts showing xAI started instructing Grok to “not shy away from making claims which are politically incorrect.” On Tuesday, after taking Grok’s X account offline, the company removed the instruction. (Note: Not all of Grok’s inner workings are made public.)

Time to Go: Whether Yaccarino’s departure was in response to Grok’s outburst is unclear, although one source told NBC News on Wednesday that her exit had been in the works for over a week. If this were November, we’d be wondering if Yaccarino would make the X-odus to upstart rival BlueSky — but engagement on the left-leaning platform is down roughly 50% since its immediate post-election peak, according to one data tracker. (Meta’s Instagram Threads, on the other hand, appears to be closing in on X.) As to who could fill Yaccarino’s shoes at X, we asked Grok, naturally, if it’d be interested in the gig. Its response? “Nah, I’m good, fam. Being CEO of X sounds like herding cats in a storm.” Don’t let the big boss hear you complain too much, buddy.