OAN Staff Brooke Mallory
4:30 PM – Wednesday, July 9, 2025
Linda Yaccarino has announced that she is officially stepping down from her position as CEO of X, according to a post made on the social platform on Wednesday.
“After two incredible years, I’ve decided to step down as CEO of X,” she wrote. “I’m incredibly proud of the X team – the historic business turn around we have accomplished together has been nothing short of remarkable.”
The former NBCUniversal executive joined the X team in 2023, shortly after Elon Musk acquired the social media platform.
Musk and Yaccarino led an ambitious effort to overhaul the formerly-left-wing company — then still known as Twitter — with Musk asserting that the platform had become excessively “woke.”
Twitter permanently banned President Donald Trump on January 8, 2021, citing the risk of “further incitement of violence” in connection with the January 6th protests at the U.S. Capitol — despite the president telling his fans and supporters to remain peaceful at the time.
In her resignation announcement, Yaccarino expressed strong support for both the company and its owner, highlighting several initiatives launched during her tenure, including xAI.
This artificial intelligence platform powers Grok, the company’s own chatbot, which recently drew criticism after posting antisemitic content on X on Tuesday.
However, Yaccarino’s resignation was apparently “not connected to the Grok incident,” according to a source familiar with the matter who was granted anonymity to speak candidly to the press.
Musk also publicly addressed Grok’s “malfunction” on Wednesday, attributing the issue to the AI chatbot being “too compliant to user prompts” and “too eager to please and be manipulated, essentially.”
He appointed Yaccarino — who had led NBCUniversal’s advertising division for more than a decade — to help repair fractured relationships with advertisers and bring stability to the company following his acquisition in 2022.
In the aftermath of the takeover, Musk also enacted sweeping layoffs.
“What does it really take to operate Twitter, a group text service at scale. How many people are really needed for that?” Musk said on April 18, 2023.
“If you don’t care about censorship, you don’t need a lot of people running Twitter,” he added.
Additionally, in response to seemingly performative concerns from lefty advertisers wary of “politically incorrect” messaging on the platform, X previously sued a group of them that it accused of improperly boycotting the website.
Nonetheless, Musk and Yaccarino have publicly stated that X’s advertising has since stabilized, and some prominent mainstream companies have restarted campaigns on the site.
Yaccarino spearheaded several strategic transformations of the platform, including the integration of artificial intelligence and the introduction of premium subscription tiers, while successfully preserving its relevance amid rising competition from emerging platforms like Meta’s Threads and Bluesky.
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