Linda Yaccarino to step down as CEO of Elon Musk-owned X

Linda Yaccarino said Wednesday that she will step down as CEO of X, the social media platform owned by Elon Musk. The announcement comes just a day after X's Grok chatbot published a wave of antisemitic posts, which resulted in the company shutting down its ability to issue text replies.

In a post on the platform, Yaccarino did not explain the reason for her departure or address the controversy around the antisemitic content from Grok, but said she was proud of the work the company had done to turn around its business.

"We started with the critical early work necessary to prioritize the safety of our users — especially children, and to restore advertiser confidence," she wrote. "This team has worked relentlessly from groundbreaking innovations like Community Notes, and, soon, X Money to bringing the most iconic voices and content to the platform. Now, the best is yet to come as X enters a new chapter with @xai."

Yaccarino’s departure was in the works for over a week, a source familiar with the situation told NBC News.

Yaccarino joined the company in May 2023, when it was still called Twitter, serving as the first chief executive after Musk bought it. Before that, she had been head of ad sales for NBCUniversal, the parent company of NBC News. Later that year, she told CNBC that her role was to focus on the business side of X.

“Elon works on the technology and dreams up what’s next,” she said. “I bring it to market.”

Almost two years later, it's unclear how much Yaccarino was able to accomplish. Efforts to make X the "everything app" have showed few signs of materializing, while Musk has moved to embrace artificial intelligence technology, most notably the chatbot Grok. Musk's AI startup, xAI, acquired X in March in a deal that valued the social media platform at $33 billion.

Grok has been broadly embraced by users as a way to add context and fact checking to posts, but it has recently encountered issues with its output. Most notably, Grok stopped responding to user requests Tuesday after it began to churn out antisemitic posts days after an update.

It wasn't the first time Yaccarino had to handle issues around antisemitism on the platform as CEO. In 2023, she had to weather the fallout after Musk shared an antisemitic conspiracy theory that Jewish groups were part of a coordinated plot to spread anti-White hate. Musk's posts caused a wave of advertiser departures from the platform, which Yaccarino was tasked with managing.

Yaccarino stood by Musk's side and defended him even as Musk continued to take actions that were contrary to her statements. In August 2023, Yaccarino met with the Anti-Defamation League's Jonathan Greenblatt to discuss how to address antisemitic hate on X. Days later, Musk began "liking" content related to the #BanTheADL hashtag led by far-right figures on the platform. It was one of several instances in which Musk appeared to publicly sidestep and undermine Yaccarino's work.

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Yaccarino's departure also comes not long after Musk stepped down from his White House duties and his growing split with President Donald Trump. Musk said in late May that he would return to being "super focused" on X, xAI and his other companies, SpaceX and Tesla.

Musk thanked Yaccarino for her work in a short post on X.

During her time as CEO, Yaccarino made several highly scrutinized public appearances.

In a series of 2023 interviews, she was grilled about her and Musk's distinct roles at X and her leadership of the company.

In January 2024, she was compelled to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee in a hearing on child sexual exploitation alongside the CEOs of Meta, SNAP and TikTok. Yaccarino stood out at the hearing, supporting legislation to regulate tech companies on the issue of child safety.

As Yaccarino has highlighted X's work around child safety, the platform has struggled to contain the issue. In June, NBC News found hundreds of posts published per hour on various X hashtags offering up child sexual abuse material — a problem that was first reported in 2023. The child safety technology company Thorn has also ended its relationship with X after alleging that X had failed to pay its bills to the nonprofit, with the platform saying it would begin relying on its own moderation technology.