Linda Yaccarino resigns as CEO of X, the ball goes back to Elon Musk

In December 2022, Musk had published a poll: "Do you want me to step down as CEO of Twitter?". The yes vote had been the winner. And he had resigned a few months later, announcing on 12 May 2023 that the new ceo of the then Twitter company would be Linda Yaccarino. The daughter of two Italians, a company executive, close to Donald Trump, in her Musk saw the woman capable of revitalising the company's advertising business, at that time in sharp contraction, and of initiating that mutation from social network to 'everything app', on the model of the Chinese WeChat: an app where everything could be done, even payments.

The CEOs of Musk's companies have a hard life. Statistically they last very short. Yaccarino was one of the longest-lived and seemingly autonomous, even though Musk apparently intervened a lot, but after two years he said he is leaving the leadership of X. He thanks Musk for the great opportunity and says the best is yet to come.

Musk had hired her one year after the $44 billion takeover of twitter. It was a desperate and very controversial year, which began with the idea of bringing freedom of expression and wiping out the woke culture and ended with censorship of journalists and the return to the platform of those who had been dismissed by the previous management, Trump above all.

Formerly head of advertising at NBCUniversal, Yaccarino has set his sights on relaunching X by investing mainly on three fronts: enhancing video functionality, strengthening relationships with creators, and developing X Money, a digital wallet with a peer-to-peer payment system, whose launch - blocked by regulatory delays and the need to obtain licences to ensure compliance - is expected by the end of the year.

In an interview with the Financial Times last month, Yaccarino claimed that 96% of the company's advertising customers prior to its acquisition had returned to the platform. How things really stand is difficult to know because the company is no longer listed. On 28 March 2025, xAI, i.e. the company founded by Musk in 2023 that is active in artificial intelligence, bought X in a share deal: estimated value $33 billion, which becomes $45 billion including liabilities. The aim is to integrate X's data and platform with the technological power of xAI to develop AI products. Is X therefore worth almost as much as twitter once was? Here again, there is no certain answer, because this is a private valuation with a share of debt. Moreover, the company now has a third as many employees as when it was acquired. What seems clear at the moment is the desire to make it an artificial intelligence platform. Grok, the Ai chatbot developed by xAI, is in fact accessible within X.