Don’t feel sorry for Linda Yaccarino
Linda Yaccarino is Twitter/X’s CEO — but the company’s real boss is owner Elon Musk.
Linda Yaccarino left her job running ad sales for NBC to become the CEO of Twitter about a year ago. How’s it going?
On the one hand: Not good, at all. Twitter’s ad business, which fell in half after Elon Musk bought the company, continues to sputter. User numbers don’t look like they’re growing, either.
On the other hand: She could be doing much better. It’s just that Musk, who renamed Twitter “X,” keeps making her job hard.
That’s the argument that both The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal have presented in the last few days, via lengthy profiles produced by teams of reporters.
Here’s the Times: “Mr. Musk is always one whim away from undoing her work. Ms. Yaccarino’s task of repairing and remaking X’s business over the past year has been complicated by Mr. Musk’s seeming disregard for the advertising industry and his constant unraveling of her efforts.”
And the Journal: “Yaccarino keeps running into a problem: She doesn’t always have the final say,” which is “impeding some core initiatives, including some payments efforts and restoring ad revenue.”
If you are a conspiracist, you might argue that these pieces reflect an effort by Yaccarino, who used to enjoy quite flattering press treatment when she was in ad sales, to salvage her reputation if she leaves Twitter.
An alternate argument: Yaccarino has been on the job for a year. It’s pretty standard to write a profile of a CEO after they’ve been on the job for a year.
Option C: Both things can be true.
Both the Times and the Journal have good anecdotes to back up the Linda-does-one-thing, Elon-undoes-it premise. Some of them you definitely know about if you pay any attention at all to Twitter’s fortunes: Musk telling advertisers to go fuck themselves, or scuttling a video deal with former CNN anchor Don Lemon.
Some are more behind the scenes. The Journal, for instance, reports on a Yaccarino deal with Visa to help Twitter build a payments business, which fell apart after executives who report to Musk balked. The Times says Yaccarino tried to get Musk to un-cancel his deal with Lemon. (Twitter hasn’t responded to my request for comment.)
If you take the most generous reading of the stories, your conclusion might be: Man. What a hard job Linda Yaccarino has! It must be very hard to work for Elon Musk.
And that would be true. But the thing that neither piece wants to fully say out loud is a simple one: All of this was completely predictable.
By the time Yaccarino agreed to take the Twitter job, Musk’s capricious track record as Twitter’s owner had been well-established. And even before Musk bought Twitter, it was quite clear he had no actual plan for it — underlined by the fact that he spent several months trying not to buy it after signing a deal to buy it.
And Yaccarino would have known that as well, or better, than anyone: After all, Musk essentially announced he had hired Yaccarino while she was still at NBC, days before she was supposed to give a crucial “upfront” sales pitch for NBC. That forced her to bail on the presentation and her existing job.
Then, after formally hiring Yaccarino, Musk made it clear that while her title would be chief executive officer, she wouldn’t actually be running the company. Because while she’d be in charge of its business, he’d be overseeing all of the company’s product and tech work. Reminder: Twitter is a tech company.
You can still imagine a bunch of reasons Yaccarino took the job, even after she’d been pre-emptively undermined: Money, ego, a rare chance to have get the CEO title at a big, well-known company. Maybe even a sincere belief in Musk’s mission, and/or a bet-on-yourself ethos that told her that she would be the one to make it work with Musk.
But the fact that after a year on the job, the erratic, hard-to-work-for guy she went to work for remains erratic and hard to work for? That shouldn’t be a surprise.
