After an exceptionally turbulent start under Elon Musk’s ownership, Twitter is finally winning back advertisers that had fled the platform after the billionaire famously told them to “go f*** yourselves” if they were concerned about rising hate speech on the platform he bought for $44 billion in 2022 and renamed X.
The work to win back those advertisers, which account for about 75 per cent of X’s revenue, was largely down to the efforts of one person: Linda Yaccarino.
The former head of global advertising at the entertainment giant NBCUniversal joined as X’s chief executive in June 2023 and wooed advertisers over champagne and canapés on superyachts at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity on the Côte d’Azur. But this week, in a tweet of course, she quit.
• Linda Yaccarino abruptly steps down after two years as CEO of X
“After two incredible years, I’ve decided to step down as CEO of X,” she said with no hint of a reason for her exit in a week when the company had been thrust back into the spotlight over antisemitic posts churned out by its AI chatbot, Grok.
Musk posted a reply, saying only: “Thank you for your contributions.”
Without Yaccarino’s charm and with Musk back in the hotseat, will advertisers stay the course or jump ship again out of fear that his often erratic behaviour could damage their brands’ reputations?
“She leaves a huge, huge void,” Dan Ives, managing director and senior equity research analyst at Wedbush, said. “She was integral to building back trust in Twitter. She led the company during an intensely chaotic period and managed to stabilise it, increase user engagement and bring back advertisers.
“There are a lot of opportunities for continued success at Twitter, but you can’t sugarcoat it: they are losing the lungs of X with Linda leaving.”
Ives, who has been covering technology companies for two decades, said finding a replacement for Yaccarino would be an exceptionally hard task as she had “the unique ability of having a strong advertising and social [media] background, and she got along with Musk”.
He added: “There are very few people who will be able to do both. Musk continues to exercise very strong control of the platform and you need someone that can play nice with him in the sandbox.”
Yaccarino surprised analysts by sticking it out with Musk for as long as she did: many predicted her exit each time Musk reignited controversy but Yaccarino publicly defended him every time. When he went on stage and gave his four-letter advice to advertisers, she wrote a memo to all staff defending Musk’s stance on free speech and described his overall comments as “candid and profound”.
She wrote: “Our principles do not have a price tag, nor will they be compromised — ever.”
Jasmine Enberg, principal analyst at eMarketer, said: “Being the chief executive of X was always going to be a tough job and Yaccarino lasted in the role longer than many expected.
“Faced with a mercurial owner who never fully stepped away from the helm and continued to use the platform as his personal megaphone, Yaccarino had to try to run the business while also regularly putting out fires.”
She said Yaccarino achieved success in rebuilding X’s ads business, which she expects to return to growth in 2025 after more than halving between 2022 and 2023 following Musk’s takeover. Revenue in 2025 is expected to come in at about $2.4 billion, up from $1.94 billion in 2024.
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Randall Peterson, director of the Leadership Institute at the London Business School, said Yaccarino’s exit was a fresh example of a chief executive struggling in a battle for control with a very hands-on owner.
“It’s incredibly hard to run a company when the owner is so heavily involved,” he said. “She was probably promised autonomy but the reality was clearly different. You can fight it for a while but in the longer run it is untenable. We predicted she would last two years, and that’s how long it ended it up being. It’s just long enough to show that you were the right hire.”
Peterson said that whoever followed Yaccarino would have to have an “awfully large ego to imagine they can handle Musk differently”.
Names of possible successors are already swirling. The YouTuber Mr Beast, real name Jimmy Donaldson, has offered his services on X, where he changed his bio to read “X Super Official CEO”. When Mr Beast previously offered, on X, to become chief executive before Yaccarino was appointed, Musk responded: “It’s not out of the question.”
More seriously in the frame is Nikita Bier, a social media app developer whom Musk appointed head of product this month, three years after he too tweeted that the platform should hire him. “I’ve officially posted my way to the top,” he said on X announcing his new position. “While I already spend every waking hour on this app, I’ll now be spending that time helping others unlock that same value.”
Drew Benvie, chief executive of the social media consultancy Battenhall, said Bier, who has been dubbed the “king of virality” for a slew of apps he has created for teenagers, could help “inject some fresh ideas” into X.
“Perhaps the thing Twitter needs is a new look and feel. It has been through a really difficult period and it needs a change to signal that the bad times are over,” Benvie said. “It does suit his [Bier’s] skill set and he is clearly ambitious.”
Musk’s vision for X extends far beyond Twitter’s origins as a “virtual townsquare” for people to connect and exchange information and ideas in 140 characters.
He wants X to be the “Everything App” and told his employees, those that remained after axing about 6,000 roles, that it would eventually replace YouTube, LinkedIn, dating apps and even financial services.
Artificial intelligence will be at the centre of everything at the new X, which he signalled by transferring X’s ownership to his AI venture xAI in a deal that valued X at $33 billion in March.
Only this week, however, it sparked further controversy when its AI chatbot Grok started referring to itself as MechaHitler and made antisemitic comments in response to user queries. Musk has apologised and the comments have been deleted.
Despite all the controversy, Benvie said X continued to be popular with advertisers seeking to connect with communities. “When I speak to large companies about where they’re putting their ad money, they are still interested in Twitter,” he said. “There are competitors now but none of them — Instagram’s Threads, Bluesky, Mastodon, Truth Social — have replaced the speed and volume of Twitter.
“When Musk took over, everyone expected one of the new ones to hoover up all of the users, but none of them have really taken off in the same way.”
• Elon Musk’s X removes Grok AI chatbot posts praising Hitler
Instead, he said, people have mostly turned to established apps including TikTok, Instagram and LinkedIn.
“The beneficiaries are the old school apps, which was not what anyone expected,” he said. “They have become a bit more old school Twitter-y with a bit more news and a bit more comment.”
X still has 374 million active users, not hugely down from 397 million before Musk took over in 2022, according to research by eMarketer. “A lot of them are probably a whole lot less active than they used to be, but not that many people have actually quit Twitter entirely,” Benvie said. “So there’s an opportunity there if they can improve the experience and make it a bit more friendly, the users and the advertisers could come back.”