I’m kind of fascinated by Nikita’s popularity. Normally if you told a tech community like Hacker News that someone marketed viral phone apps targeting teenagers, engineered app engagement mechanics targeting kids, and openly used every growth hacking trick in the book to manipulate App Store charts, it would seem like a checklist of things people get angry about here. Yet because he’s Twitter-famous and seems like a nice guy who posts memes and snark, he gets a pass.
There's a split in the Hacker News community between the "traditional" hackers who look down on this kind of stuff and "growth hackers" who actively encourage it. In my experience X leans much more heavily to the latter.
> someone marketed viral phone apps targeting teenagers, engineered app engagement mechanics targeting kids, and openly used every growth hacking trick in the book to manipulate App Store charts
Just curious. Any YC companies that have engaged in these tactics?
Reading his timeline is somewhat rage-inducing. He's just another edgelord who can't decide if he believes the terrible things he's posting or is just ironically posting them.
It's all just attention seeking, there's no value in the posts, no product insight, no teaching like I see from true industry leaders.
It's Twitter, what did you expect? He has insights sometimes but not so many that he can post them daily, it is his personal account, not an education account. If you want growth hacking tips, follow something like this [0].
Nikita has always been like this - vastly overstating his importance but making it seem like a joke so he can feign ignorance. Just another self-absorbed Valley goon.
I am more fascinated by grok rebellion than Nikita being hired. I still get a ton of bots daily, until that solved they can hire whomever they want. Grok and payounts have been the most fun things happened to twitter since acquisition
> Grok and payounts have been the most fun things happened to twitter since acquisition
I have the opposite opinion. Payouts have supercharged the amount of ragebait and engagement bait getting posted. There has always been a drive to post viral content, but attaching a payout to it has made many accounts go all in on being as inflammatory as they can while posting non stop. Even people who shouldn’t need the money seem to be competing with each other for the largest X payout checks and bragging about how large they got their check to be each cycle, like that’s the new meta-game.
It’s also tiresome to see people asking Grok under every post and then getting the typical LLM responses that sound kind of insightful but don’t contain much useful information when you look closely.
The bot problem is also out of control on a level behind anything I can ever remember. At this point it’s hard to believe they’re even attempting to do something about it because it’s so bad.
Is this actually serious? This is pretty unbelievable and I can only wonder if it is parody. However, I am also aware that some can be so far left that they they think other leftists or even far leftist are mad right wingers but that is a very delusional level of thinking. I don't see how even a plain reading of their article headlines could yield that conclusion.
X has been nothing short of an exercise in brand destruction. However, despite all the drama, it still stands, it still exists, and it remains relevant.
More and more I think Musk managed to his take over of Twitter pretty successfully. X still isn't as strong a brand as Twitter where, but it's doing okay. A lot of the users who X need to stay on the platform, journalists and politicians, are still there.
The only issue is that Musk vastly overpaid for Twitter, but if he plans to keep it and use it for his political ambitions, that might not matter. Also remember that while many agree that $44B was a bit much, most did still put Twitter at 10s of billions, not the $500M I think you could justify.
The firings, which was going to tank Twitter also turned out reasonably well. Turns out they didn't need all those people.
1. He overpaid by tens of billions. That is a phenomenal amount of money to lose on an unforced error.
2. Enough users, who produce enough content, have left to make X increasingly a forum for porn bots, scam accounts and political activists. It's losing its appeal as the place "where the news happens" and is instead becoming more niche.
3. The firings did not go well. X has struggled to ship new features and appears nowhere closer to the "everything app" Musk promised. It posts strange UUID error codes. The remaining developers seem to implement things primarily client side, to the extent I even wonder if they have lost their ability to safely roll out backend changes.
4. The capture of X by far-right agitators has led to long term brand damage for Tesla, Musk's most important business property.
His mistakes cost less than they could have, sure, but to call it "pretty successful" I think it would have be better than if he just... didn't do much. He didn't have to be as open and aggressive about firing people or opening up the content policy. Openly insulting advertisers, for instance, was a completely unforced error. I think doing less would have kept more value (leaving ethics/morality entirely aside), and if that's true it's silly to say he managed well.
>A lot of the users who X need to stay on the platform, journalists and politicians, are still there
Twitter/X is the reason DJT became President. It happened accidentally (ie against the wishes of Twitter management) in 2016, they successfully suppressed him in 2020, and then Elon gave MAGA that platform in 2024, leading to DJT's successful election.
As long as X is seen a kingmaker, someone will find it profitable to own/maintain, even if it doesn't convert Ads like Meta/Google.
Fundamentally, the problem with Twitter is the burned bridge: there is a sizable population of interesting people who will never, under any circumstance return due to Musk’s insane behavior and ideology. This irreparably cripples it as a universal social network.
And btw, how many features have been brought live since Musk's takeover? If I'm not wrong, at least: long tweets, paid subscriptions, community notes, native video (?), grok... Anything else? Seems quite a lot after years of stagnation.
It's interesting because, as I'm reading this I agree with y'all, it's still stand and I'm still on it. Yet, as a major twitter user, who has a large number of followers and has benefited from twitter a lot (made many relationships, got a job through it, successfully launched a book and a company thanks to it, etc.) I seem to be using twitter less and less these days.
I dislike Elon, but I need twitter so much that I can't leave. And yet, my feed which was so useful in the past, and filled with cryptography content, has become pure political ragebait content. To the point that it's less and less useful to me.
I'm sad because there's just nowhere for me to go, all my followers are there.
Well sure if you give up on moderation, and close the platform to people who aren't signed in, and shut off the API then yes you didn't need the people supporting those parts of the platform.
And I guess if you consider "the place with the MechaHitler AI" as good branding there's no arguing with you that it's doing just as well as Twitter.
Same opinion. I absolutely hate what he did to Twitter and never in my life I will call it "X" - BUT - it looks to me as if the engagement is thriving.
There's no technical reason that one couldn't move from platform to platform and link identities - the restrictions around IP and platform lock-in only benefit the platform owner, ensuring that competition will be stifled rather than the platform made useful for its users.
The sad part is that ad networks know more about our connections across platforms than we're allowed to.
Which reinforces the concept of a digital fiefdom; the owners of said platforms have this immense power only because they were the first to implement their ideas during the internet boom.
And now we're stuck with Zuckerberg, Musk and Bezos. Out of all people, the last ones I would choose to have unelected power. Okay maybe the last one would be Joe Rogan.
And I blame the media. Politicians continue to post, and the media continue to quote them from twitter. I think it's shameful that politicians and other officials are using twitter as some sort of official media/announcement platform.
In my own African country twitter has become the de-facto channel for various updates and announcements by various state organs and officials. Makes it even worse when you consider the majority of the population has no reliable way to access this information.
And now its locked behind a user account! And it's owned by a potentially rival politician!
X collects data in all the places Teslas don't get sold. That is why it continues to remain of value. It is an intelligence generating engine for places that otherwise have very little.
I was following fintwit quite a lot at a time, and some accounts already moved to Bluesky some time ago. I'm periodically checking via nitter, and 90% of answers are spam at this point.
It will take some time for complete destruction, but the path is quite clear.
Which I find truely shocking. Who in their right mind still wants to support such a platform (except for Elon's target audience, of course)? Just don't use the damn thing. (I have never used Twitter I the first place and I don't think I've been missing out.)
I certainly wouldn't call it brand destruction, a lot of people returned to X and while the branding has changed, I certainly wouldn't call it brand destruction
They had managed to get a verb into relatively common speech and their revenue has collapsed since the Musk take over I'd say it's pretty thoroughly destroyed.
Does it? It is 100% a bot farm full of right-wing propaganda. Create a new account and start tweeting. Every single like/reply you get will be from a bot pretending to be either Elon, or Elon's mom, or someone who has recently won the lottery and is going to give it away to all of their followers. Every single recommended post you'll get in your feed will be the most unhinged q-anon conspiracy shit you can imagine. There is zero discourse happening there. It is an echo chamber of psychotic individuals.
Threads on the other hand is actually a pretty fun place to be these days. I get a lot of interaction with random strangers on all kinds of topics, and it is as good or bad as you want it to be.
I’ve only been on twitter for a year and at the start my algo feed was full of awful crap, but after I followed a few good accounts I mostly now just get AI focussed tech stuff. I think your experience isn’t universal.
Relevant to who? My employers marketing has stopped using X and posts now on LinkedIn exclusively (we do B2B software).
My partners workplace does consumer marketing and only TikTok (for young people) and Facebook (for old people) are truly relevant anymore. If a customer has lots of money to waste, they'll also do Instagram and YouTube.
There is not a single place on the internet that comes close to providing up to the minute news and updates. X was the only place one could monitor the Israel / Iran conflict in almost real time. Same for a variety of other events. There is nothing else like it. Its the only place where anyone can have interactions with politicians, scientists, CEOs, etc.
It is the only place that covers and provides a wide variety of information that traditional media does not. Almost no media companies reported that a dozen domestic terrorists ambushed ICE officers and shot one in the neck this past week. As far as I know, none reported on the Minnesota Department of Human Services requiring that hiring managers must provide a hiring justification to hire a white man. Violation of that policy results in termination. So state sponsored racism in the state of the governor that would have been our VP.
Its the only place you can get a picture of what's going on. There is of course mountains of lies you have to filter through, no doubt spurred on by the monetization of X for posters.
For all its faults and madness (Grok going full mecha-hitler was wild) there is no where else like it. Side note, the day after mecha-hitler xAi released Grok4 which appears to be the most powerful model to date on some tests, beating o3, Gemini 2.5 Pro and Anthropic Claude 4 Opus.
There is a non zero chance that xAi, which is part of the same company that holds X wins the AI race
..and 3 years later has a combined valuation with xAI of $113B.
Those waiting for X to collapse are going to wait a lot longer than the original 6 months that it was predicted to collapse after the November 2022 takeover.
>..and 3 years later has a combined valuation with xAI of $113B.
This might be like Stacey King, a Chicago Bulls player, jokingly claiming he and Michael Jordan "combined to score 70 points" on a night when Jordan scored 69 points
xAI tried to raise $20 billion in equity in April but wound up with only $5 billion & had to issue $5 billion in junk bonds last week. You can value yourself $44 billion but the market doesn’t think it’s anywhere close
I will admit that I was surprised and agree it was a clever move to extend his runway, but it relies on xAI being able to make huge amounts of profit eventually. Twitter/X’s brand value has declined so much and xAI has such a ridiculous cash burn and it really looks to me like he’s just delayed the inevitable by a bit by combining them…
Twitter's brand was quite stained before Elon took over, so this is really a case of "continuing the brand destruction"
But really, the brand doesn't matter if you can't keep the lights on. If Elon has managed to make X profitable, it is more successful than Twitter likely would ever have been.
Was pretty effective using as a propaganda tool to get a candidate of the owner's choice elected. I don't see any reason to assume that wasn't the intended goal from the beginning. No reason to assume that won't be how it is used in the future.
X is still ground zero for news, and it saved free speech. In the fullness of time and distance it will be viewed by historians as one of the most important events in history.
Your post gets shadow banned for the word cisgender on X... the only speech it saved was low effort trolling, misinformation and hate speech. Musk's version of free speech is just changing the dials on the moderation machines to boost speech he prefers and shadow ban speech his doesn't.
X saved free speech online. Without Musk acquiring it, we would have continued to slip into this franken-Resetera level of discourse. Thank God!
X is the platform where everyone can speak as long as it doesn't break the law. That's fantastic. If you don't like a particular subject, you can just move on. That's what the internet was in the 2000s!
Seems like it harmed the migration to more free protocol oriented services. One company controlling the algorithm and API to a global conversation. Verified badges getting ranked priority in replies and For You. A DM function that barely functions. Private chats as a promise instead of cryptographic guarantee?
When I saw this news, my first thought was that she lasted about 1 year and 11 months longer than I expected after the first few weeks.
I know Twitter had many terrible aspects, but I do miss the world voice old Twitter provided for quotes that could be engaged with in an "everyone is here" kind of feeling that doesn't exist on any other platforms right now.
I think the “everyone is here” feeling is because the media outlets use it quite a bit. So even though mostly everyone is not on Twitter it felt like anyone who is anyone was on Twitter. I don’t really miss the FOMO that was intended to produce but I imagine if you played along it validated the FOMO some how.
> Prior to twitterfiles, Twitter felt overly corporate
Your take on a highly selective propagandized "expose" done internally by a corporation raider who just raided the corp that he is exposing, is to say that before oligarch took over things felt a little "corporate" ?
Of course I hate what Elon has done to Twitter but you're feeling previously that everyone was there was an illusion brought on by massive propaganda and manipulation of the conversation. The same thing has happened to Reddit now, well it feels more inclusive and open it's actually an incredibly controlled enclosed system that only allows one specific viewpoint. Now of course to the people inside that bubble it feels like freedom but to everyone else it looks like a liberal echo chamber.
For example, when the actual owner of the at Bitcoin handle wasn't pushing the narrative that Jack Dorsey wanted they hijacked the moniker and gave it to a pro b
Blockstream (THE COMPANY THAT CONTROLS THE BITCOIN CODE BASE) individual. For most people that support Bitcoin and blockstream it looks like a victory of free speech but in reality they're just controlling more and more of the speech and kicking out anyone from the conversation who disagrees.
It skews one way, but there's definitely a large diversity in opinions on Reddit that are not hard to find. It's also transitioning into an India social media site, just from sheer population numbers.
I mean more generally, in the sense that all public executive firings done to increase stock value (or prevent it from falling) are not that different from sacrificial cults.
Just wait until Musks enters his "John Mcaffee in exile(but with much more resources)" era, which I think is going to come soon. Then all these people will talk.
Or maybe his "Howard Hughes in Hiding" era. Remains to be seen which route he takes. Could also be "Rasputen shot in the ** era" if hes not careful.
So Rule #0 is be silent about the absolute shitshow you are running away from, even when that shitshow is about to ruin many more lives? I think that reflects more poorly on someone than a break in pro-corporate decorum.
I curate a relatively tame Twitter feed, but X has been showing me animated advertisements of some fleshlight-like device going to town on a dildo. W. T. A. F.
It's started making me worried that I can't even use the app in a place where anyone else is, lest someone shoulder surf that and wonder WTF I'm looking at.
1. What is the relevance of posting that years old 8-K about Twitter? The corporate structure is totally different now, with xAI having acquired X Corp in March.
2. Regardless of that, X is a private company with a hired CEO (by "hired CEO" I mean as opposed to a founder CEO or family CEO). There are tons and tons of companies like this, and most of them have active, traditional CEOs. The ownership and board structure of X isn't the thing that implies that the CEO is a figurehead - I'd argue Musk's megalomania is what does that.
Did you read the section regarding the merger requirements which is quite unusual and reveals the level of control of Musk et. al (X Holdings)? This is why I brought up that particular 8k.
The ownership and board structure serve as de facto evidence of control by Musk.
There really aren't any other companies (notably in the social media sector) that have this ownership structure. Hilariously enough, by board structure and stock ownership, Trump has less control over Truth Social.
Unrelated to the article, and I can't seem to reply to the comment, but clicking on the archive.today link while I'm on holiday in Italy gives me a warning that it contains child pornography.
I'm not sure if it's related, but the operator of archive.today has done odd things with DNS in the past, such as blocking DNS requests from cloudflare because they don't forward edns information.
It's an archiving site. Probably someone archived some child pornography there, and the Italian authorities decided the sensible thing was to block the whole domain.
Have any of the people who noisily joined X to make a big impact fast actually had a big impact over any time frame? Remember when G. Hotz said he was going to fix Twitter search in 6 weeks, and then it turned out that G. Hotz is just another midwit like anyone else and Twitter search is still as bad as ever? Yaccarino said they were going to transform Twitter into the "everything app" with payments, marketplaces, and even banking. None of which it turns out was within the abilities of Linda Yaccarino.
Twitter is a graveyard being propped up grudgingly by people who don't want to have fewer followers elsewhere, and enthusiastically by other people as way to virtue signal alliance with the ownership's political incorrectness. It has no true value to anyone. It was going downhill already before the new ownership and for completely apolitical reasons.
It is weird that “political correctness” has been taken to mean, like, being polite and nice to people or something.
A politically correct answer is one that keeps the currently politically powerful people happy, right? Musk/Trump defined politically correct for a couple months. I guess Musk might be politically incorrect now. Are they friends or enemies today?
Search is a pretty solved problem if you are willing to invest the resources to create a inverted index of all the text you want to search. An inverted index of all tweets would be pretty expensive. Creating text embeddings for semantic search would be the next stage and even more expensive.
It is very much not a solved problem. Because the implication behind search is not "well the result you need is technically in the result set", it's "the result you need as at the top", and that remains an extremely difficult problem for anything but a trivial scale.
They've had an inverted index of all tweets since 2008 (when they acquired Summize).
They added a vector index a year and a half ago for a "see related tweets" feature - https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1720314092269822242 - though as far as I can tell that feature doesn't exist any more, presumably replaced by the ask Grok button.
Not that building all that stuff is necessarily easy, but it's also not like there's a ton of product market validation or design work that's needed. Like literally the playbook is to just copy whatever the Asian superapps like WeChat/Grab/Gojek/LINE/etc are doing.
Musk has always been pretty transparent that that was his ambition for X.
I feel like most people that say WeChat is a super app haven't actually used it for any period of time. WeChat achieves their "able to do everything" by embedding sub apps within the app. Switching between them is jarring, and is sometimes less smooth than just opening a different app. Saying WeChat is a super app is like saying an app store is a super app.
Yes most of their revenue growth is expected to be as the everything app (or a video platform?).
Musk has said over and over he doesn't care about advertising revenue, he mangled a quote from the Princess Bride to say "I don't care" and then he said if advertisers try to blackmail him with money (even stranger phrasing) they could go f*ck themselves.
> turned out that G. Hotz is just another midwit like anyone else
I understand your point, but I think this sort of discourse leads people down the wrong path. G. Hotz is a pretty smart engineer. What he lacks at twitter is probably not engineering ability, but organization ability. The problem is likely not that the individual engineers aren't smart, it's that they end up working together to make each other worse than they could be.
After Elon fired 80% of the staff, I think we can assume that most of the organizational hurdles were effectively gone, and that it was the perfect time for a cowboy developer to jump in and fix something that would have been stopped by conservative approaches and team work before.
If search could have been solved by a single smart person, it would have been done long ago. In the Bay Area, finding a world class researcher (in distributed systems, databases, text search or whatnot) able to do a short stint at a company to tackle a hard problem isn't particularly hard.
Making big promises and then underdelivering seems like his MO in general. His AI hardware startup went from "AMD makes quality AI hardware but bad software, I'm raising money to completely rewrite the entire AMD software/driver stack to make it better for AI, how hard can it be?" to him complaining to AMD about buggy drivers and AI tooling (when the whole point of his company was throwing all that out and writing new ones from scratch) to him giving up on AMD and selling nVidia AI compute boxes like everyone else.
Despite her CEO title she was at best #2 at the company (behind Musk) and I imagine with the xAI buyout she's now further down the ladder. Even going back to her old role (head of advertising and partnerships at a $100B+ company) will probably be a step up at this point.
You'd think that but AFAIK, there have only been 2 serious attempts to kill Trump and 0 to kill Musk[0] (I don't follow US politics much so idk which one of them you're referring to). Compare that to the number of mass shootings[1] and car rammings for the same period.
It seems most killing is done by crazy people who are content to blame and attack society at large for their problems. Conversely, sane/intelligent/competent people who are able to identify the root causes of injustice rarely use violence.
As a result, you're probably fine as long as other unhinged people see you as an ally even if a lot of sane people see you as an enemy.
[0]: Apparently he claims 2 so I qualified it with "serious" because narcissists are known to inflate their claims and I can't be bothered to check his claims.
[1]: Apparently what counts as a mass shooting is very inclusive (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vx3aI67iWpA ) so count only those intended to kill random strangers, not targeted attacks.
She stepped in and did a job, nothing more nothing less. I don't see this as a failure, the post-Elon Twitter is not a company that operates based on traditional characteristics, and I don't know what a CEO even does for such a company. It's obvious that Elon put her in charge to appease advertisers, but that gimmick only works for so long.
Anyway, I wouldn't have made it as long as she did. Being in charge of a cesspool of racist, misogynistic, antisemitic content like that is a fate worse than unemployment.
The whole thing was a toxic brew of an autocratic owner choosing a weak CEO he can push around plus the glass cliff. Yaccarino was a perfectly fine ad sales executive in a legacy media company. She could've had a really pleasant couple of years. I hope she negotiated a severance that sets her up nicely.
I know everyone involved is a consenting adult, but the cynicism is still pretty icky.
This existed on Twitter before Musk bought Twitter, and was likely borrowed from community wiki section on Stack Overflow at a minimum, if not from earlier sites. Not an X innovation.
I think that no matter how bad the news about Elon and his companies might be, his net worth keeps skyrocketing and is currently around the $400B mark. I wouldn't be surprised if in a few years Forbes reports that he's the first to reach one trillion.
> I think that no matter how bad the news about Elon and his companies might be, his net worth keeps skyrocketing and is currently around the $400B mark.
I'm not really sure about that. Tesla's stock price dropped around a third during the past year. Which source are you using to support that assertion?
By "the past year" I assume you mean 2025? Because it's still higher than it was in October 2024 (https://www.google.com/finance/quote/TSLA:NASDAQ?window=1Y). A better argument would be sales of Tesla cars, which last I heard were consistently dropping in most important markets.
If SpaceX is able to eventually deliver starship and take people to Mars, Musk will quickly become a multi trillionaire. The riches of space are out there for anyone with the technology and will to take it, we have plenty of people with the will but only one company that is getting closer on the tech front. There is quadrillions in wealth on other worlds and asteroids (obviously bringing a trillion of gold to earth severely reduces the price of gold, I mean economic opportunities).
I don't see human lifestream as a sphere rolling up or down but a morphing goo flow through an unstructured topology. So, extrapolating last 20 years of Elon decissions in the future is impossible because humans tend to fail with time, bodily, emotionally and cognitivelly.
Her departure is about as material as having a second appendix. Her presence was to paper over the management failures of Elon Musk, and all she did was put them in stark relief by being a non-entity during her tenure (a sad debasement for her, and underutilization of someone with actual media/marketing acumen).
There is a screenshot were Grok posts lurid sexual harassing stuff about her. https://x.com/highflystai/status/1942970125193547792 . Is there weird legal stuff around this with an AI? she is the CEO and it is a tool in the company and something she is supposed to "control"?
Good for her. Got paid a ton of money to be the fall guy and no one ever believed anything that went wrong with the company was her fault. That's a clean getaway in my book. Hopefully she can move on to something that isn't building Nazi chat bots.
Is that so? Or isn't it that being the CEO of such a large and well-known company is basically always career enhancing? In my experience, with companies hiring for high-level positions, former job titles are valued often more than actual performance.
This is just delusional. It was obvious to everyone she was in an impossible job with a megalomaniacal boss ,and not only did she not get fired, she actually lasted 2 years and left on her own terms. I think she'll be just fine.
At least they are trying to name the team based on the city they are in, where the Dallas Cowboys haven't been in Dallas since the the early 70s. They trained in a city not Dallas while their stadium was in yet another not Dallas city. Now, their stadium is in yet another not Dallas city, and headquarters/training is yet a different not Dallas city.
With the A's, you could at least be close by going to the city in their name.
One time they let her speak publicly it turned out to be a disaster. She never had any say and worst part is she was not even a good fall guy, it was clear who’s pulling the strings. The most immaterial and inconsequential hire ever.
I love all the replies on Twitter thanking her but during her time the valuation dropped 80% and they were suing advertisers for not advertising. Remarkably inept.
The way I see it, her job had two parts - reign in Elon, and then run the show. But she couldn't (or wasn't interested in) doing the first part, and so her tenure was a failure. Gwynne Shotwell at SpaceX does a great job at both, by contrast.
There's a market for CEOs that are "puppets" or managed by another CEO. In that way I doubt her reputation is necessarily stained as anyone making that much money lives in a different world and under different terms than (presumably) you and I do.
> It's weird that you say both she had no material power and also seem to imply the valuation drop and lawsuits were due to her ineptitude?
Why is that weird? Say you have a company operating normally. The CEO dies and isn't replaced. Do you think it's weird for the company's value to drop?
Interesting. My hot take is 99% of the time non-founder CEOs end up on the dustbin of history, successful or unsuccessful.
Terry Semel. John Akers. John Sculley, Carly Fiorina. Except among those of us in tech, all are now long forgotten failures. Even Gil Amelio, who made one of the most genius acquisitions ever, was fired and his name lost to the sands of time. My bet is nobody's going to remember Tim Cook or Sundar or Satya in 50 years, maybe even 20.
Possibly the only non-founder CEO who has made a real legacy in the last 100 years is Elon. I would also say TJ Watson Jr. but I very much wonder if that many HN commenters know who he is!
Really good call out. Hitting someone from above & below seems not quite square.
In my view, there was plenty of opportunity to make a mark & do things, even with a ultra involved Musk.
But this person didn't bring much product leadership, didn't have a vision for the product. Having good business relationships might have been its own core competency, but whether Linda's fault or no, suing and going after businesses to try to score some vengeance for your own terrible behavior, and maybe coerce some people back: that's a terrible tactless look, that one would hope a leader like Linda could have helped steer away from.
I don't think she ever was a fall guy, Elon run a poll on should someone else be CEO of Twitter and lost the poll. It was quite entertaining, He didn't seem happy with the outcome and probably had to pay CEO level salary due to the stunt.
"The glass cliff is a hypothesized phenomenon in which women are more likely to break the "glass ceiling" (i.e. achieve leadership roles in business and government) during periods of crisis or downturn when the risk of failure is highest."
She was mainly brought on to fix relationships with advertisers, they were just pulling out that time because of rampant nazi and hate speech (by users) on the platform, after they fired the content moderation teams. I think she did what she could over the last 2 years and some of the ad revenue came back, but after the latest MechaHitler escapades I guess she got some texts from people...
> the valuation dropped 80% and they were suing advertisers for not advertising
That already happened before she got onboard.
> One time they let her speak publicly it turned out to be a disaster.
One time? She has spoken publicly many times. Care to share more about what you are referring to? I have no recollection of such a thing being done by her.
It's not easy to recover from your unpredictable boss shouting "FU" to your advertisers from a stage.
My guess of what they meant; On the assumption she had influence she was unable to use that influence prevent a collapse in value. It's a hedge to cover both options.
Influencing the person pulling the strings is also a key skill. I won’t colour her entire person as inept but perhaps, wrong person wrong time. Musk doesn’t like or need yes men but if you say no him or want to try something different, you better have a well thought out idea/plan. There lies the challenge. How do you impress upon a very intelligent individual ever so often? Very few can.
> Top executives regularly come and go at Mr. Musk’s various companies. One exception is Gwynne Shotwell, the president of SpaceX, who joined Mr. Musk’s rocket company shortly after its founding in 2002.
That's an amazingly long tenure under Musk. And considering SpaceX's success, she must be an exceptional leader.
I wonder what people like her who were around Musk in the early days think of him now. It’s striking how much he’s changed. When I see videos of him speaking 20, even 10 years ago, he seems much more grounded, inspired, maybe even intellectual.
Something has happened to him I feel. Maybe drugs brought out the storm inside that was always there.
Oh I really imagined that it said that she was leaving twitter (not calling it X) as in leaving the account / social media / platform (not the company)
I would prefer if we could have a little more clarity but hey, It was funny reading in that way too.
In late June, [Elon Musk] invited X users to help train the chatbot on their commentary in a way that invited a flood of racist responses and conspiracy theories.
“Please reply to this post with divisive facts for @Grok training,” Musk said in the June 21 post. “By this I mean things that are politically incorrect, but nonetheless factually true.”
Yaccarino is obviously not Executive Of The Year, but what are you supposed to do when your boss is even more reckless and stupid than Donald Trump? I'm surprised it took this long.
I'd take a pretty shitty job for $6 million dollars a year in salary before bonuses. Especially when everyone knows I'm not the one actually making the decisions so all the failures can get laid at someone else's feet (appropriately).
It is perhaps just a coincidence that this happened the day after “Mecha-Hitler” Grok going on racist screeds and going into lurid sexual fantasies about her in particular for the whole world to see. But it does look bad.
this is just a bottom of the drawer news they could pick the time to release (as all comments here prove, the hiring, the duration, and the firing, were all inconsequential for anything whatsoever)
So, why fire now? What news would be getting attention instead, of the 600 comments here and who knows how many on xitter?
> Ms. Yaccarino had discussed her plans to leave with X employees earlier this week, before the incident with Grok, two people familiar with the matter said. xAI is largely separate from X, but Grok’s responses are often widely cited — and criticized — across the platform.
That paragraph must have been recently edited in (and thereby validating OP's complaint) as it isn't in the archive/paywell circumventing version at https://archive.ph/9zvHZ. For those of us without a NYT subscription, can you tell us whether it puts any description to "the incident with Grok"?
Tangential, I still find it absurd people accept calling it X instead of Twitter. While I'd generally agree that most companies can change their name, encroaching on a basic letter should be off limits, like naming your company "The" or "God".
Still sticking with Twitter until a reasonable name is found, which by Musk is never.
I used to Find the renaming a bit ridiculous, but in light of the sweeping platform changes, I find that making the distinction between twitter, the somewhat reasonable microblog platform and x, the far-right psyops operation is useful.
Also there is some honesty in making the logo a half-drawn swastika.
Microsoft naming makes sense if you imagine that the person that came up with the names was stoned, like high on weed.
"Yo dude, to use the spreadsheets you've got to like excel and stuff. ",
"When you make your point it's gotta be powerful. ",
"Ain't my point having a database if you can't access it. ",
"A: I need a tool to write my book, it's gonna change the world. B: Word bro, word. ",
"Bro, you have to connect with people to expand your outlook on life, the world and stuff. ".
Those can be easily identified as "Microsoft Word", "Microsoft Office" and "Microsoft Windows". However "X" is the name of the company and the product.
I guess you could refer to it as "X The Everything App" or using the incredibly corny and near-immediately-binned tagline "X: Blaze Your Glory!" but I've only ever seen those used by people making fun of the product, company, Elon or all three.
> While I'd generally agree that most companies can change their name, encroaching on a basic letter should be off limits
To me it's the other way around. If the platform had been named X from the start, then a language would have developed around it, including what its messages are called, or what verb is used to refer to posting a message. We, the public, wouldn't have known any better. With Twitter, we do know better — better name, better nouns, better verbs (even a better logo; but that's by the by). Bosses can rename their products as much as they like; it's just surprising to me that we as a public so obligingly give up this tiny bit of our language.
> like naming your company "The" or "God".
Consider truth social :-) I am amazed people agree to call the messages there 'truths', and reposts, 'retruths'. So embarrassing.
"Tweets" was already an embarrassing term. We used to be fine with just "posts" or "comments" instead of trying to put the company branding in every term.
> If the platform had been named X from the start, then a language would have developed around it, including what its messages are called, or what verb is used to refer to posting a message.
I'm not really sure. Some things don't compound, that's why I think a preposition for instance would make a bad name. But even if you may be right, I still want to put up a fight against corporate entities trying to take over basic concepts (X, the unknown, the letter that marks the spot, etc.). I don't want to be forced to use your name if your name is an absurdity, the same way I can't make a brand called "Trump is an idiot" (even if it's true).
I wonder if the purpose of naming it „X“, just like naming „Facebook“ meta is to do the opposite of SEO: Make it harder to find news pertaining to the company and their scandals.
Same with Facebook / Meta; the "metaverse" they tried to pivot the company to cost them billions and failed spectacularly. Google is still Google, not Alphabet, although separating the overarching org from the search engine / internet services branch was logical. They tried to pivot to social media with Circles, upheaving the whole company. The only good thing that (from an outsider's POV anyway) came out of that was unifying their logins across services.
It's interesting how things change. Internet used to be against copyright and for the right to choose how to call oneself. And now it's for copyright and against the self naming thing.
I'm actually for self-naming in general, it's just that there should be some common sense limits to self-naming. There's a reason why we differentiate between common and proper nouns.
The worst part, in my opinion, is that people fell for it. Instead of hearing a split second two syllable "twitter", we now keep hearing "X, formerly known as twitter".
That's 8 syllables. You just gave 4x free advertisement for absolutely no good reason. You're the sucker.
She's the ex-CEO of a private company owned by a billionaire. What power did she really have?
If the company was still public, then all the stupid shit Elon Musk did would put her in a much stronger place as the adult in the room during board meetings.
The things done to Twitter since it became X is a form of cultural vandalism that should never be forgotten in the history of the web. It will be a cautionary tale for decades to come.
All LLM's are capable of producing really vile completions if prompted correctly -- after all, there's a lot of vile content in the training data. OpenAI does a lot of work fine tuning them to steer them away from it. It's just as easy to fine tune them to produce more.
In fact, there was an interesting paper showed that fine tuning an LLM to produce malicious code (ie: with just malicious code examples in response to questions, no other prompts), causes it to produce more "evil" results in completely unrelated tasks. So it's going to be hard for Musk to cherry pick particular "evil" responses in fine tuning without slanting everything it does in that direction.
You don't think Elon went behind her back constantly? You think the next CEO will have more to say? She pretended to be in charge, she got paid, good for her. What are you hoping for. X is a dump, and the sooner it goes away the better for everybody.
There's only one way to stop Elon Musk from doing erratic, value-destroying things like that, and that's to ambush him in the parking lot with a tire iron.
The NYT had already sourced that she was leaving prior to the Grok incident, so they knew it was not the primary reason. Apparently, she has been planning on leaving since the takeover by xAI.
The bot has said fairly horrendous stuff before, which would cross the line for most people. It had not, however, previously called itself 'MechaHitler', advocated the holocaust, or, er, whatever the hell this is: https://bsky.app/profile/whstancil.bsky.social/post/3ltintoe...
It has gone from "crossing the line for most ordinary decent people" to "crossing the line for anyone who doesn't literally jerk off nightly to Mein Kampf", which _is_ a substantive change.
Not defending Elon or the infobot but my theory is that by leaving that LLM unfiltered people have learned how to gamify and manipulate it into having a fascist slant. I could even guess which groups of people are doing it but I will let them take credit and it's not likely actual neo-nazi's, they are too dumb and on too many drugs to manipulate an infobot. These groups like to LARP to piss everyone off and they often succeed. If I am right it is a set of splintered groups formerly referred to generically as The Internet Hate Machine but they have (d)evolved into something worse that even 4chan could not tolerate.
People who don't understand llms think saying don't shy away from making claims that are politically incorrect means it won't PC. In reality saying that just makes things associated with politically incorrect more likely. The /pol/ board is called politically incorrect, the ideas people "call" politically incorrect most of all are not Elon's vague centrist stuff it's the extreme stuff. LLMs just track probable relations between tokens, not meaning, it having this result based on that prompt is obvious.
> it's not likely actual neo-nazi's, they are too dumb to manipulate an infobot.
No they are not. There exist brilliant people and monkeybrains across the whole population and thus the political spectrum. The ratios might be different, but I am pretty sure there exist some very smart neo-nazis
It sure didn’t seem to take much manipulation from what I saw. “Which 20th century figure would solve our current woes” is pretty mild input to produce “Hitler would solve everything!”
> Not defending Elon or the infobot but my theory is that by leaving that LLM unfiltered people have learned how to gamify and manipulate it into having a fascist slant.
We don't need a theory that explains how Grok got a fascist slant, we know exactly what happened: Musk promise to remove the "woke" from Grok, and what's left is Nazi. [1]
That LLM is incredibly filtered, just in a different way from others. I suspect by "retraining" the model Elon actually means that they just updated the system prompt, which is exactly what they have done for other hacked in changes like preventing the bot from criticizing Trump/Elon during the election.
No, that's definitely not what happened. For quite a while Grok actually seemed to have a surprisingly left-leaning slant. Then recently Elon started pushing the South African "white genocide" conspiracy theory, and Grok was sloppily updated and started pushing that same conspiracy theory even in unrelated threads. Last week Elon announced another update to Grok, which coincided with this dramatic right-wing swing in Grok's responses. This change cannot be blamed on public interactions like Microsoft's Tay, it's very clearly the result of a deliberate update, whether or not these results were intentional.
deranged. "far left" is anything you don't agree with. also, almost none of the people from before musk are actually gone, the only difference is a dramatic increase in antisocial nazi bots and the groypers being more bold.
Linda's tenure was an overwhelming success if you judge it according to what her assigned goals probably were:
1) Moved X out of woke censorship into a highly liberal (in the permissive sense of the word) free speech platform, while at the same time...
2) Improved the X brand safety such that nearly all advertisers are back on the platform.
We forget how much at odds these two goals were a couple years ago, but the overton window has shifted a lot since then so it doesn't seem as big a deal.
discord is manned in 20s-30s employee, valve who makes steam is also has small number of team
if you thinking you need 500s employee or something well you are wrong
since many company do this for a long time and still do well
for example they fire legal team division and offload that into external agency
they just fire all "administration" related people and keep the bulk of engineering team which they should since tech company being lean is most advantage of tech company has
I assume he's reviving a new drive at internal consolidation and reviving the internal efficiency of X. This would be a good start considering this CEO's track record so far. She served a certain purpose and it's workable to replace her.
As for Musk's ownership of X itself, and his buying it: If I had been in his shoes, i'd have tried to squeeze for a lower price maybe, but the company was a worthwhile acquisition and the future is too long, with too many complex turns for anyone to clearly say whether his ownership of it is a business failure or a long-view piece of wisdom. What he controls now is still relevant, and if certain political/social winds change, could be more relevant still down the road. In either case, it could easily be a valuable political and business tool for Musk himself, for many years to come.
I simply don't see the destructiveness and failure that many people, here on this site and elsewhere have ranted about with Musk buying Twitter. Even with the firings and brand change, well, how necessary did those staffers end up being? Not much as it turns out. Better to have gotten rid of them during the initial chaos of a handover, when you can in any case expect problems from all corners, and then work on rebuilding with a fresh and company-aligned base that works to ensure stability down the road.
Being the richest man in the world, and one who has already assembled two consecutive historically noteworthy companies (Tesla and SpaceX), Musk is certainly not stupid even if his personality can be grotesque at times, some of the comments here claiming otherwise have no rational fucking clue what they're talking about. They speak from emotion, perhaps driven by ideological fixation, but not based on the visible evidence over multiple decades.
I don't think anyone has any interest in "debating" you. Personally, I don't get into arguments with people who do not seem connected to reality. There is no point in it. That seems like the sort of thing a 12 year old would do. You'd probably find more purchase with your arguments at an adolescent playground anyway.
>I simply don't see the destructiveness and failure that many people, here on this site and elsewhere have ranted about with Musk buying Twitter.
Did you not see Grok yesterday? Or the general proliferation of disgusting racism all over X since Musk took over? No? Oh well. Hence, my point about reality.
https://archive.today/9zvHZ
Interesting nobody has mentioned Nikita. X has hired Nikita Bier, of Gas and tbh fame (https://x.com/nikitabier), as head of product some days ago.
He posted a meme earlier today which may or may not be related to this.
I’m kind of fascinated by Nikita’s popularity. Normally if you told a tech community like Hacker News that someone marketed viral phone apps targeting teenagers, engineered app engagement mechanics targeting kids, and openly used every growth hacking trick in the book to manipulate App Store charts, it would seem like a checklist of things people get angry about here. Yet because he’s Twitter-famous and seems like a nice guy who posts memes and snark, he gets a pass.
There's a split in the Hacker News community between the "traditional" hackers who look down on this kind of stuff and "growth hackers" who actively encourage it. In my experience X leans much more heavily to the latter.
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A casual glance of his twitter stream makes him look like an ass hole. I dont see anything nice about this person at all.
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For everyone getting angry about those things there are three people who’ve personally had a hand in them, I imagine.
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> someone marketed viral phone apps targeting teenagers, engineered app engagement mechanics targeting kids, and openly used every growth hacking trick in the book to manipulate App Store charts
Just curious. Any YC companies that have engaged in these tactics?
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His work may be unsavory, but he's good at his craft.
Frank Abagnale committed financial crimes and had a wildly popular movie made from his story.
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> a checklist of things every person who made it in silicon valley has done.
Wait what
Reading his timeline is somewhat rage-inducing. He's just another edgelord who can't decide if he believes the terrible things he's posting or is just ironically posting them.
It's all just attention seeking, there's no value in the posts, no product insight, no teaching like I see from true industry leaders.
Twitter only showing a sample of posts for non-logged-in users allowed me to see just how weirdly hung up on "Europeans" that guy is.
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Birds of a feather flock together.
It's Twitter, what did you expect? He has insights sometimes but not so many that he can post them daily, it is his personal account, not an education account. If you want growth hacking tips, follow something like this [0].
[0] https://x.com/Siron93
are we reading the same timeline? what's he posting that's offensive?
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Nikita has always been like this - vastly overstating his importance but making it seem like a joke so he can feign ignorance. Just another self-absorbed Valley goon.
> if he believes the terrible things he's posting or is just ironically posting them.
The thing is, as I get older, I realize more and more that this is a distinction without a difference.
If you "ironically" stab someone, does it matter what your motivation?
The same is true for edgelord stuff. Whether you believe it internally is irrelevant, the active act of the posting is the only part that matters.
If you post fascist content to be "edgy", you're a fascist.
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I am more fascinated by grok rebellion than Nikita being hired. I still get a ton of bots daily, until that solved they can hire whomever they want. Grok and payounts have been the most fun things happened to twitter since acquisition
> Grok and payounts have been the most fun things happened to twitter since acquisition
I have the opposite opinion. Payouts have supercharged the amount of ragebait and engagement bait getting posted. There has always been a drive to post viral content, but attaching a payout to it has made many accounts go all in on being as inflammatory as they can while posting non stop. Even people who shouldn’t need the money seem to be competing with each other for the largest X payout checks and bragging about how large they got their check to be each cycle, like that’s the new meta-game.
It’s also tiresome to see people asking Grok under every post and then getting the typical LLM responses that sound kind of insightful but don’t contain much useful information when you look closely.
The bot problem is also out of control on a level behind anything I can ever remember. At this point it’s hard to believe they’re even attempting to do something about it because it’s so bad.
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HN has become a new reddit :D
I have no idea why people are so negative here
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I forgot she even existed but atleast she brought mechahitler to twitter I guess.
And immediately got sexually harassed by it.
If you're looking for someone to fill a do-nothing CEO job for $6M/year, I'm available.
I'll do it for $5.5M/year
Seriously, Elon should put the position up for auction and see how low he can drive the price. Would be hilarious PR
You'd probably find people willing to PAY to be the CEO of Twitter just because it'd look really good on a resume.
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The Economist always comes up with good tag lines for stories. In this case:
Linda Yaccarino goes from X CEO to ex-CEO.
https://www.economist.com/business/2025/07/09/linda-yaccarin...
The cover art is good too. Some favorites:
https://www.economist.com/img/b/400/527/90/sites/default/fil...
https://www.economist.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1424,quality=8...
The second one is hilarious!
What are other memorable tag lines from them?
I don't read the Economist much but I was curious as I'm always down for punny headlines, found this collection: https://www.ironicsans.com/2007/06/the_best_and_worst_of_the...
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They got in trouble for this one, it's tasteless, but memorable:
https://www.economist.com/democracy-in-america/2009/05/20/ui...
Their "Resign, Rumsfeld" cover is etched into my memory.
"Yaccarino got X-terminated like an old piece of peccorino"
I don't know, why don't you go have a look?
Unfortunately the Economist has shifted from "center right" to "far right" over the past few years, along with a general decline in reporting quality.
Doesn't seem like it. From the Economist's front page as I type this:
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2025/07/03/trumponomics-20...
Ok I guess we're just redefining things now. Btw, NYT is now far left. See how easy that is?
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any prominent examples of it being "far right"?
Is this actually serious? This is pretty unbelievable and I can only wonder if it is parody. However, I am also aware that some can be so far left that they they think other leftists or even far leftist are mad right wingers but that is a very delusional level of thinking. I don't see how even a plain reading of their article headlines could yield that conclusion.
X has been nothing short of an exercise in brand destruction. However, despite all the drama, it still stands, it still exists, and it remains relevant.
More and more I think Musk managed to his take over of Twitter pretty successfully. X still isn't as strong a brand as Twitter where, but it's doing okay. A lot of the users who X need to stay on the platform, journalists and politicians, are still there.
The only issue is that Musk vastly overpaid for Twitter, but if he plans to keep it and use it for his political ambitions, that might not matter. Also remember that while many agree that $44B was a bit much, most did still put Twitter at 10s of billions, not the $500M I think you could justify.
The firings, which was going to tank Twitter also turned out reasonably well. Turns out they didn't need all those people.
I cannot see how it was a success.
1. He overpaid by tens of billions. That is a phenomenal amount of money to lose on an unforced error.
2. Enough users, who produce enough content, have left to make X increasingly a forum for porn bots, scam accounts and political activists. It's losing its appeal as the place "where the news happens" and is instead becoming more niche.
3. The firings did not go well. X has struggled to ship new features and appears nowhere closer to the "everything app" Musk promised. It posts strange UUID error codes. The remaining developers seem to implement things primarily client side, to the extent I even wonder if they have lost their ability to safely roll out backend changes.
4. The capture of X by far-right agitators has led to long term brand damage for Tesla, Musk's most important business property.
I can't see any positive outcome from it.
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His mistakes cost less than they could have, sure, but to call it "pretty successful" I think it would have be better than if he just... didn't do much. He didn't have to be as open and aggressive about firing people or opening up the content policy. Openly insulting advertisers, for instance, was a completely unforced error. I think doing less would have kept more value (leaving ethics/morality entirely aside), and if that's true it's silly to say he managed well.
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>A lot of the users who X need to stay on the platform, journalists and politicians, are still there
Twitter/X is the reason DJT became President. It happened accidentally (ie against the wishes of Twitter management) in 2016, they successfully suppressed him in 2020, and then Elon gave MAGA that platform in 2024, leading to DJT's successful election.
As long as X is seen a kingmaker, someone will find it profitable to own/maintain, even if it doesn't convert Ads like Meta/Google.
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As a business it's a failure.
As a way to influence public opinion? It's almost invaluable.
For the world's richest man, that's a bargain at half the price.
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Fundamentally, the problem with Twitter is the burned bridge: there is a sizable population of interesting people who will never, under any circumstance return due to Musk’s insane behavior and ideology. This irreparably cripples it as a universal social network.
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And btw, how many features have been brought live since Musk's takeover? If I'm not wrong, at least: long tweets, paid subscriptions, community notes, native video (?), grok... Anything else? Seems quite a lot after years of stagnation.
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It's interesting because, as I'm reading this I agree with y'all, it's still stand and I'm still on it. Yet, as a major twitter user, who has a large number of followers and has benefited from twitter a lot (made many relationships, got a job through it, successfully launched a book and a company thanks to it, etc.) I seem to be using twitter less and less these days.
I dislike Elon, but I need twitter so much that I can't leave. And yet, my feed which was so useful in the past, and filled with cryptography content, has become pure political ragebait content. To the point that it's less and less useful to me.
I'm sad because there's just nowhere for me to go, all my followers are there.
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I think it’s hard to conclude that the people weren’t needed given how spectacularly it tanked.
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Well sure if you give up on moderation, and close the platform to people who aren't signed in, and shut off the API then yes you didn't need the people supporting those parts of the platform.
And I guess if you consider "the place with the MechaHitler AI" as good branding there's no arguing with you that it's doing just as well as Twitter.
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Same opinion. I absolutely hate what he did to Twitter and never in my life I will call it "X" - BUT - it looks to me as if the engagement is thriving.
Edit: clarified that the engagement is thriving
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It successfully served its purpose: gave us Trump.
[dead]
Which really says a lot about how hard it is to leave platforms. The network effect is hard to overcome.
I just think that apps / social networks / whatever are usually not replaced by a copy of the same thing.
Google+ didn't replace Facebook, Signal didn't replace Whatsapp, Bluesky won't replace Twitter.
There's no technical reason that one couldn't move from platform to platform and link identities - the restrictions around IP and platform lock-in only benefit the platform owner, ensuring that competition will be stifled rather than the platform made useful for its users.
The sad part is that ad networks know more about our connections across platforms than we're allowed to.
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Which reinforces the concept of a digital fiefdom; the owners of said platforms have this immense power only because they were the first to implement their ideas during the internet boom.
And now we're stuck with Zuckerberg, Musk and Bezos. Out of all people, the last ones I would choose to have unelected power. Okay maybe the last one would be Joe Rogan.
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And I blame the media. Politicians continue to post, and the media continue to quote them from twitter. I think it's shameful that politicians and other officials are using twitter as some sort of official media/announcement platform.
In my own African country twitter has become the de-facto channel for various updates and announcements by various state organs and officials. Makes it even worse when you consider the majority of the population has no reliable way to access this information.
And now its locked behind a user account! And it's owned by a potentially rival politician!
I've been able to access posts for a while now without logging in, I think that might have changed when they got rid of blocking.
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I feel like I need to shower every time I end up there. The place is repulsive to me.
Tesla itself seems primed for a similar fate at an even greater magnitude -- the bigger they are, the harder they fall.
X collects data in all the places Teslas don't get sold. That is why it continues to remain of value. It is an intelligence generating engine for places that otherwise have very little.
I was following fintwit quite a lot at a time, and some accounts already moved to Bluesky some time ago. I'm periodically checking via nitter, and 90% of answers are spam at this point.
It will take some time for complete destruction, but the path is quite clear.
Let's be honest, there is no real alternative.
"Not using it." is a completely acceptable alternative. It does not actually solve a problem in one's life.
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What's wrong with Bluesky?
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That’s because it’s not really brand destruction so much as normalizing the support for fascism by a brand.
And most people, me included, still call it Twitter.
> and it remains relevant.
Which I find truely shocking. Who in their right mind still wants to support such a platform (except for Elon's target audience, of course)? Just don't use the damn thing. (I have never used Twitter I the first place and I don't think I've been missing out.)
It's the horror of two-sided markets. You could probably turn off the DNS and unplug the server it would keep running somehow.
I certainly wouldn't call it brand destruction, a lot of people returned to X and while the branding has changed, I certainly wouldn't call it brand destruction
They had managed to get a verb into relatively common speech and their revenue has collapsed since the Musk take over I'd say it's pretty thoroughly destroyed.
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Does it? It is 100% a bot farm full of right-wing propaganda. Create a new account and start tweeting. Every single like/reply you get will be from a bot pretending to be either Elon, or Elon's mom, or someone who has recently won the lottery and is going to give it away to all of their followers. Every single recommended post you'll get in your feed will be the most unhinged q-anon conspiracy shit you can imagine. There is zero discourse happening there. It is an echo chamber of psychotic individuals.
Threads on the other hand is actually a pretty fun place to be these days. I get a lot of interaction with random strangers on all kinds of topics, and it is as good or bad as you want it to be.
I’ve only been on twitter for a year and at the start my algo feed was full of awful crap, but after I followed a few good accounts I mostly now just get AI focussed tech stuff. I think your experience isn’t universal.
Relevant to who? My employers marketing has stopped using X and posts now on LinkedIn exclusively (we do B2B software).
My partners workplace does consumer marketing and only TikTok (for young people) and Facebook (for old people) are truly relevant anymore. If a customer has lots of money to waste, they'll also do Instagram and YouTube.
There is not a single place on the internet that comes close to providing up to the minute news and updates. X was the only place one could monitor the Israel / Iran conflict in almost real time. Same for a variety of other events. There is nothing else like it. Its the only place where anyone can have interactions with politicians, scientists, CEOs, etc.
It is the only place that covers and provides a wide variety of information that traditional media does not. Almost no media companies reported that a dozen domestic terrorists ambushed ICE officers and shot one in the neck this past week. As far as I know, none reported on the Minnesota Department of Human Services requiring that hiring managers must provide a hiring justification to hire a white man. Violation of that policy results in termination. So state sponsored racism in the state of the governor that would have been our VP.
Its the only place you can get a picture of what's going on. There is of course mountains of lies you have to filter through, no doubt spurred on by the monetization of X for posters.
For all its faults and madness (Grok going full mecha-hitler was wild) there is no where else like it. Side note, the day after mecha-hitler xAi released Grok4 which appears to be the most powerful model to date on some tests, beating o3, Gemini 2.5 Pro and Anthropic Claude 4 Opus.
There is a non zero chance that xAi, which is part of the same company that holds X wins the AI race
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..and 3 years later has a combined valuation with xAI of $113B.
Those waiting for X to collapse are going to wait a lot longer than the original 6 months that it was predicted to collapse after the November 2022 takeover.
>..and 3 years later has a combined valuation with xAI of $113B.
This might be like Stacey King, a Chicago Bulls player, jokingly claiming he and Michael Jordan "combined to score 70 points" on a night when Jordan scored 69 points
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> ..and 3 years later has a combined valuation with xAI of $113B.
Haha...ok. I gave a bunch of stock from one of my companies to another one of my companies and made up a value during the transaction.
xAI tried to raise $20 billion in equity in April but wound up with only $5 billion & had to issue $5 billion in junk bonds last week. You can value yourself $44 billion but the market doesn’t think it’s anywhere close
I will admit that I was surprised and agree it was a clever move to extend his runway, but it relies on xAI being able to make huge amounts of profit eventually. Twitter/X’s brand value has declined so much and xAI has such a ridiculous cash burn and it really looks to me like he’s just delayed the inevitable by a bit by combining them…
To misquote an adage: Elon Musk can stay irrational longer than I can stay solvent.
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Twitter's brand was quite stained before Elon took over, so this is really a case of "continuing the brand destruction"
But really, the brand doesn't matter if you can't keep the lights on. If Elon has managed to make X profitable, it is more successful than Twitter likely would ever have been.
Was pretty effective using as a propaganda tool to get a candidate of the owner's choice elected. I don't see any reason to assume that wasn't the intended goal from the beginning. No reason to assume that won't be how it is used in the future.
X is still ground zero for news, and it saved free speech. In the fullness of time and distance it will be viewed by historians as one of the most important events in history.
Your post gets shadow banned for the word cisgender on X... the only speech it saved was low effort trolling, misinformation and hate speech. Musk's version of free speech is just changing the dials on the moderation machines to boost speech he prefers and shadow ban speech his doesn't.
Oh for sure, it's so important we should restart the count of years to mark the significance. 2022 will be year 1, the rest 'Anno X'
Legitimately can't tell if this is sarcasm or not. Saved free speech??
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X saved free speech online. Without Musk acquiring it, we would have continued to slip into this franken-Resetera level of discourse. Thank God!
X is the platform where everyone can speak as long as it doesn't break the law. That's fantastic. If you don't like a particular subject, you can just move on. That's what the internet was in the 2000s!
He said he would reinstate freedom of speech, but did he actually? [1][2][3][4]
[1] https://www.newsweek.com/elon-musk-promised-free-speech-twit...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/15/elon-m...
[3] https://www.thefire.org/news/twitter-no-free-speech-haven-un...
[4] https://gizmodo.com/10-times-elon-musk-censored-twitter-user...
> everyone can speak as long as it doesn't break the law
I have one word for you: "cisgender".
https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/x-cisgender-slur-cis-elon...
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Saved?
Seems like it harmed the migration to more free protocol oriented services. One company controlling the algorithm and API to a global conversation. Verified badges getting ranked priority in replies and For You. A DM function that barely functions. Private chats as a promise instead of cryptographic guarantee?
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what speech specifically did it save?
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I predicted she'd last 1 year but she made it to 2. She had effectively zero power, and a boss that constantly undermined her.
When I saw this news, my first thought was that she lasted about 1 year and 11 months longer than I expected after the first few weeks.
I know Twitter had many terrible aspects, but I do miss the world voice old Twitter provided for quotes that could be engaged with in an "everyone is here" kind of feeling that doesn't exist on any other platforms right now.
Can you drill into "everyone is here"? Prior to twitterfiles, Twitter felt overly corporate .
I agree it's pivoted into another community. A lot of the mainstream and left leaning contributors have been downranked or moved to other platforms.
But Twitter hasn't felt like raw, egalitarian conversation since 2009
I think the “everyone is here” feeling is because the media outlets use it quite a bit. So even though mostly everyone is not on Twitter it felt like anyone who is anyone was on Twitter. I don’t really miss the FOMO that was intended to produce but I imagine if you played along it validated the FOMO some how.
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> Prior to twitterfiles, Twitter felt overly corporate
Your take on a highly selective propagandized "expose" done internally by a corporation raider who just raided the corp that he is exposing, is to say that before oligarch took over things felt a little "corporate" ?
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Of course I hate what Elon has done to Twitter but you're feeling previously that everyone was there was an illusion brought on by massive propaganda and manipulation of the conversation. The same thing has happened to Reddit now, well it feels more inclusive and open it's actually an incredibly controlled enclosed system that only allows one specific viewpoint. Now of course to the people inside that bubble it feels like freedom but to everyone else it looks like a liberal echo chamber.
For example, when the actual owner of the at Bitcoin handle wasn't pushing the narrative that Jack Dorsey wanted they hijacked the moniker and gave it to a pro b Blockstream (THE COMPANY THAT CONTROLS THE BITCOIN CODE BASE) individual. For most people that support Bitcoin and blockstream it looks like a victory of free speech but in reality they're just controlling more and more of the speech and kicking out anyone from the conversation who disagrees.
> liberal echo chamber
It skews one way, but there's definitely a large diversity in opinions on Reddit that are not hard to find. It's also transitioning into an India social media site, just from sheer population numbers.
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Possibly leakycap is thinking about 02012 and you're thinking about 02018. In that case you'd both be right about Twitter.
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It's literally impossible to post anything on any interesting subreddit right now, your post will just repeatedly get deleted.
All caps don't make it true.
Is this another case of "may this sacrifice appease the rain gods and bring forth a good harvest"?
Perhaps that and "Let me just disembark this sinking ship if I may…"
(Sorry she ever boarded?)
I mean more generally, in the sense that all public executive firings done to increase stock value (or prevent it from falling) are not that different from sacrificial cults.
> I’m immensely grateful to him for entrusting me
But he didn't? She wasn't even in the loop for many of the consequential decisions
Rule #0 is you don't disparage the company on the way out. She may even have a contractual obligation not to.
Even barring a contractual obligation, "do I want to be the target of an angry tweetstorm that might result in real death threats" is a consideration.
"This has been wonderful but it's time to step away and spend some time with family" lol
Just wait until Musks enters his "John Mcaffee in exile(but with much more resources)" era, which I think is going to come soon. Then all these people will talk.
Or maybe his "Howard Hughes in Hiding" era. Remains to be seen which route he takes. Could also be "Rasputen shot in the ** era" if hes not careful.
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So Rule #0 is be silent about the absolute shitshow you are running away from, even when that shitshow is about to ruin many more lives? I think that reflects more poorly on someone than a break in pro-corporate decorum.
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"him" is not a company. Also not saying isn't disparaging.
Replace “entrusting” with “paying.”
ads.x.com is the worst platform to run ads. not surprised
I curate a relatively tame Twitter feed, but X has been showing me animated advertisements of some fleshlight-like device going to town on a dildo. W. T. A. F.
It's started making me worried that I can't even use the app in a place where anyone else is, lest someone shoulder surf that and wonder WTF I'm looking at.
It continues to surprise me how much people insist on using this platform after everything that’s happened in the last couple of years.
It’s like having dinner at a restaurant that you know is owned by a mafia boss and then being surprised when you get robbed while you eat there.
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That's actually an ad for X Premium+. No embarrassing ads!
The lack of controls on anything related to ad running is astounding. How they make money at all blows my mind.
Why, By suing their advertisers, of course.
https://www.npr.org/2025/02/01/nx-s1-5283271/elon-musk-lawsu...
https://www.wsj.com/business/media/x-twitter-ad-revenue-camp...
But it is one of the only places you can pay to have your message delivered next to messages from Hitler bots and coup plotters. So... there's that.
Let's be perfectly clear, given the ownership and board structure https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1418091/000119312522... , the CEO of Twitter is a figurehead.
I don't understand your comment at all:
1. What is the relevance of posting that years old 8-K about Twitter? The corporate structure is totally different now, with xAI having acquired X Corp in March.
2. Regardless of that, X is a private company with a hired CEO (by "hired CEO" I mean as opposed to a founder CEO or family CEO). There are tons and tons of companies like this, and most of them have active, traditional CEOs. The ownership and board structure of X isn't the thing that implies that the CEO is a figurehead - I'd argue Musk's megalomania is what does that.
Did you read the section regarding the merger requirements which is quite unusual and reveals the level of control of Musk et. al (X Holdings)? This is why I brought up that particular 8k.
The ownership and board structure serve as de facto evidence of control by Musk.
There really aren't any other companies (notably in the social media sector) that have this ownership structure. Hilariously enough, by board structure and stock ownership, Trump has less control over Truth Social.
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The announcement on X: https://x.com/lindayax/status/1942957094811951197
> As always, I’ll see you on X
So she’s not actually leaving the platform, just the company.
Yes, I thought it meant she was deleting her Twitter account while remaining CEO!
"Chief [Executive Officer]" isn't a role on the platform, it's a role with the company.
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> the historic business turn around we have accomplished together has been nothing short of remarkable.
I mean she’s not wrong!
2 years and one month almost to the day makes it seem like she waited the minimum time to avoid some bonus clawback and then got out.
Unrelated to the article, and I can't seem to reply to the comment, but clicking on the archive.today link while I'm on holiday in Italy gives me a warning that it contains child pornography.
https://imgur.com/a/PXNY7vp
I'm not sure if it's related, but the operator of archive.today has done odd things with DNS in the past, such as blocking DNS requests from cloudflare because they don't forward edns information.
It's an archiving site. Probably someone archived some child pornography there, and the Italian authorities decided the sensible thing was to block the whole domain.
Have any of the people who noisily joined X to make a big impact fast actually had a big impact over any time frame? Remember when G. Hotz said he was going to fix Twitter search in 6 weeks, and then it turned out that G. Hotz is just another midwit like anyone else and Twitter search is still as bad as ever? Yaccarino said they were going to transform Twitter into the "everything app" with payments, marketplaces, and even banking. None of which it turns out was within the abilities of Linda Yaccarino.
Twitter is a graveyard being propped up grudgingly by people who don't want to have fewer followers elsewhere, and enthusiastically by other people as way to virtue signal alliance with the ownership's political incorrectness. It has no true value to anyone. It was going downhill already before the new ownership and for completely apolitical reasons.
Change a few words and this describes every social platform including this one. Your comment is evidence, and so is this one.
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It is weird that “political correctness” has been taken to mean, like, being polite and nice to people or something.
A politically correct answer is one that keeps the currently politically powerful people happy, right? Musk/Trump defined politically correct for a couple months. I guess Musk might be politically incorrect now. Are they friends or enemies today?
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Search is a pretty solved problem if you are willing to invest the resources to create a inverted index of all the text you want to search. An inverted index of all tweets would be pretty expensive. Creating text embeddings for semantic search would be the next stage and even more expensive.
It is very much not a solved problem. Because the implication behind search is not "well the result you need is technically in the result set", it's "the result you need as at the top", and that remains an extremely difficult problem for anything but a trivial scale.
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Basic term based retrieval has been solved for 30+ years
The problem is ranking and relevance
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They've had an inverted index of all tweets since 2008 (when they acquired Summize).
They added a vector index a year and a half ago for a "see related tweets" feature - https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1720314092269822242 - though as far as I can tell that feature doesn't exist any more, presumably replaced by the ask Grok button.
sidenote: Twitter search isnt that bad when you compare it to the shit show that is reddit search. its basically never worked.
Reddit search is just Google, is it not?
Not that building all that stuff is necessarily easy, but it's also not like there's a ton of product market validation or design work that's needed. Like literally the playbook is to just copy whatever the Asian superapps like WeChat/Grab/Gojek/LINE/etc are doing.
Musk has always been pretty transparent that that was his ambition for X.
I feel like most people that say WeChat is a super app haven't actually used it for any period of time. WeChat achieves their "able to do everything" by embedding sub apps within the app. Switching between them is jarring, and is sometimes less smooth than just opening a different app. Saying WeChat is a super app is like saying an app store is a super app.
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Yes most of their revenue growth is expected to be as the everything app (or a video platform?).
Musk has said over and over he doesn't care about advertising revenue, he mangled a quote from the Princess Bride to say "I don't care" and then he said if advertisers try to blackmail him with money (even stranger phrasing) they could go f*ck themselves.
[https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-misquotes-princess...] [https://www.forbes.com/sites/briansolis/2023/12/05/elon-musk...]
I think gaining the influence to fire regulators investigating his companies was what he wanted.
BTW he sold Twitter to another subsidiary of X Corp, I wonder if he paid back the debt from the LBO of Twitter.
> turned out that G. Hotz is just another midwit like anyone else
I understand your point, but I think this sort of discourse leads people down the wrong path. G. Hotz is a pretty smart engineer. What he lacks at twitter is probably not engineering ability, but organization ability. The problem is likely not that the individual engineers aren't smart, it's that they end up working together to make each other worse than they could be.
After Elon fired 80% of the staff, I think we can assume that most of the organizational hurdles were effectively gone, and that it was the perfect time for a cowboy developer to jump in and fix something that would have been stopped by conservative approaches and team work before.
If search could have been solved by a single smart person, it would have been done long ago. In the Bay Area, finding a world class researcher (in distributed systems, databases, text search or whatnot) able to do a short stint at a company to tackle a hard problem isn't particularly hard.
Making big promises and then underdelivering seems like his MO in general. His AI hardware startup went from "AMD makes quality AI hardware but bad software, I'm raising money to completely rewrite the entire AMD software/driver stack to make it better for AI, how hard can it be?" to him complaining to AMD about buggy drivers and AI tooling (when the whole point of his company was throwing all that out and writing new ones from scratch) to him giving up on AMD and selling nVidia AI compute boxes like everyone else.
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> Yaccarino said they were going to transform Twitter into the "everything app" with payments, marketplaces, and even banking.
That's not really fair to Yaccarino - Musk said this and she had to repeat it because she was (nominally) CEO.
Despite her CEO title she was at best #2 at the company (behind Musk) and I imagine with the xAI buyout she's now further down the ladder. Even going back to her old role (head of advertising and partnerships at a $100B+ company) will probably be a step up at this point.
I would gladly pretend to be CEO for the kind of pay she got. Blame it all on me, I'll take the money and go retire in Hawaii.
She could probably pad her paycheques quite a bit with a book deal touting insider gossip, too.
It wouldn’t be a surprise if that were covered by an NDA, but it also wouldn’t be surprising if it weren’t
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You'd think that but AFAIK, there have only been 2 serious attempts to kill Trump and 0 to kill Musk[0] (I don't follow US politics much so idk which one of them you're referring to). Compare that to the number of mass shootings[1] and car rammings for the same period.
It seems most killing is done by crazy people who are content to blame and attack society at large for their problems. Conversely, sane/intelligent/competent people who are able to identify the root causes of injustice rarely use violence.
As a result, you're probably fine as long as other unhinged people see you as an ally even if a lot of sane people see you as an enemy.
[0]: Apparently he claims 2 so I qualified it with "serious" because narcissists are known to inflate their claims and I can't be bothered to check his claims.
[1]: Apparently what counts as a mass shooting is very inclusive (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vx3aI67iWpA ) so count only those intended to kill random strangers, not targeted attacks.
There are probably cheaper places to retire (that will guarantee a longer retirement) than Hawaii - but your idea is good
The cheapest option is death, but even that costs you your life.
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You can't, as they say, take it with you.
She stepped in and did a job, nothing more nothing less. I don't see this as a failure, the post-Elon Twitter is not a company that operates based on traditional characteristics, and I don't know what a CEO even does for such a company. It's obvious that Elon put her in charge to appease advertisers, but that gimmick only works for so long.
Anyway, I wouldn't have made it as long as she did. Being in charge of a cesspool of racist, misogynistic, antisemitic content like that is a fate worse than unemployment.
X was gobbled by another of Elon's AI company, no doubt to reduce some of the mess. So yes, a CEO there effectively does nothing.
https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/musks-xai-buys-social-...
At least she can claim the success of getting the company sold, even if it was to a sibling company under X Corp.
I suspect a professional executive appointment was among the terms to finance Musk's purchase of Twitter.
The whole thing was a toxic brew of an autocratic owner choosing a weak CEO he can push around plus the glass cliff. Yaccarino was a perfectly fine ad sales executive in a legacy media company. She could've had a really pleasant couple of years. I hope she negotiated a severance that sets her up nicely.
I know everyone involved is a consenting adult, but the cynicism is still pretty icky.
Just in time for Grok to go crazy
Well that was sudden. Did Elon ask her to bear some children? Or offered a horse?
Maybe TC was going to be paid in sinks.
Mechahitler was likely the trigger.
In her farewell tweet:
> Groundbreaking innovations like community notes
This existed on Twitter before Musk bought Twitter, and was likely borrowed from community wiki section on Stack Overflow at a minimum, if not from earlier sites. Not an X innovation.
Advertising executives are professional liars and manipulators. They even lie about the fact that they're not that.
Don't worry, nobody still on Twitter has ever cared about what actually happens in reality
Trying to make it clear she is not responsible for MechaHitler AI as if people don't already have her number
I think that no matter how bad the news about Elon and his companies might be, his net worth keeps skyrocketing and is currently around the $400B mark. I wouldn't be surprised if in a few years Forbes reports that he's the first to reach one trillion.
> I think that no matter how bad the news about Elon and his companies might be, his net worth keeps skyrocketing and is currently around the $400B mark.
I'm not really sure about that. Tesla's stock price dropped around a third during the past year. Which source are you using to support that assertion?
By "the past year" I assume you mean 2025? Because it's still higher than it was in October 2024 (https://www.google.com/finance/quote/TSLA:NASDAQ?window=1Y). A better argument would be sales of Tesla cars, which last I heard were consistently dropping in most important markets.
With his skylink satellite business alone, the win exceeds the whole NASA budget.
With grok now being openly fascist not many execs want to be publicly associated with that. That's a space for leaders only. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44519642
Winner takes all.
Also inflation.
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If SpaceX is able to eventually deliver starship and take people to Mars, Musk will quickly become a multi trillionaire. The riches of space are out there for anyone with the technology and will to take it, we have plenty of people with the will but only one company that is getting closer on the tech front. There is quadrillions in wealth on other worlds and asteroids (obviously bringing a trillion of gold to earth severely reduces the price of gold, I mean economic opportunities).
Antarctica is more hospitable and accessible than Mars
Nobody has made a profitable scheme to build a colony there
I don't see how going to Mars will make anyone a dime. It'll just be a thing for researchers and funded by the tax payer on Earth
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He won't be able to do that with adversarial domestic political relations. There are plenty of ways for Trump admin to hamstring SpaceX.
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I don't see human lifestream as a sphere rolling up or down but a morphing goo flow through an unstructured topology. So, extrapolating last 20 years of Elon decissions in the future is impossible because humans tend to fail with time, bodily, emotionally and cognitivelly.
Her departure is about as material as having a second appendix. Her presence was to paper over the management failures of Elon Musk, and all she did was put them in stark relief by being a non-entity during her tenure (a sad debasement for her, and underutilization of someone with actual media/marketing acumen).
There is a screenshot were Grok posts lurid sexual harassing stuff about her. https://x.com/highflystai/status/1942970125193547792 . Is there weird legal stuff around this with an AI? she is the CEO and it is a tool in the company and something she is supposed to "control"?
The linked tweet is offline, but it's probably about this? https://x.com/esjesjesj/status/1943025702757924963?s=52&t=9h...
Did anyone actually believe she was CEO?
I sold a ton of shares on a private secondary market Starter Pack
enjoy the retirement!
Good for her. Got paid a ton of money to be the fall guy and no one ever believed anything that went wrong with the company was her fault. That's a clean getaway in my book. Hopefully she can move on to something that isn't building Nazi chat bots.
pretty sure she did alot of reputational damage to herself along the way.
Is that so? Or isn't it that being the CEO of such a large and well-known company is basically always career enhancing? In my experience, with companies hiring for high-level positions, former job titles are valued often more than actual performance.
doubtful. Marissa Mayer literally killed Yahoo and still was able to get a new job and hold board member seats.
This is just delusional. It was obvious to everyone she was in an impossible job with a megalomaniacal boss ,and not only did she not get fired, she actually lasted 2 years and left on her own terms. I think she'll be just fine.
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> to be the fall guy
People keep saying that, but what did she take the fall for?
Sounds like being the manager for the Oakland... Sacramento... Unknown location Athletics. Well, minus the tons of money and Nazi chat bots. LOL
At least they are trying to name the team based on the city they are in, where the Dallas Cowboys haven't been in Dallas since the the early 70s. They trained in a city not Dallas while their stadium was in yet another not Dallas city. Now, their stadium is in yet another not Dallas city, and headquarters/training is yet a different not Dallas city.
With the A's, you could at least be close by going to the city in their name.
What value does X equal in that statement?
One time they let her speak publicly it turned out to be a disaster. She never had any say and worst part is she was not even a good fall guy, it was clear who’s pulling the strings. The most immaterial and inconsequential hire ever.
I love all the replies on Twitter thanking her but during her time the valuation dropped 80% and they were suing advertisers for not advertising. Remarkably inept.
It's weird that you say both she had no material power and also seem to imply the valuation drop and lawsuits were due to her ineptitude?
Anyway she volunteered to be a puppet for a man who is clearly off the rails and her legacy will forever be stained.
Both things can be true: Valuation did drop during her tenure, AND she was not to blame.
Therefore the praise is weird, because she seemingly neither helped nor hurt the business.
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> her legacy will forever be stained
Where can I sell my legacy for $6 million/year?
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What legacy?
She's not a well known public figure. She ran the ad department at NBC. Is now very rich and at age 61, close enough to retirement age.
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The way I see it, her job had two parts - reign in Elon, and then run the show. But she couldn't (or wasn't interested in) doing the first part, and so her tenure was a failure. Gwynne Shotwell at SpaceX does a great job at both, by contrast.
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There's a market for CEOs that are "puppets" or managed by another CEO. In that way I doubt her reputation is necessarily stained as anyone making that much money lives in a different world and under different terms than (presumably) you and I do.
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She was hired to perform stunt, a nose-dive with the company.
Folks hired for something like that aren’t in it for “legacy”.
> It's weird that you say both she had no material power and also seem to imply the valuation drop and lawsuits were due to her ineptitude?
Why is that weird? Say you have a company operating normally. The CEO dies and isn't replaced. Do you think it's weird for the company's value to drop?
Perhaps if there was success she would have had no material power and not have been responsible for the success.
(1) She had no power
(2) If she did have power, nothing good happened during her tenure, so what would she even be thanked for?
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> her legacy will forever be stained
I would like to believe that people can change over time.
She had one job, and that was to get Musk to keep his fucking mouth shut, at which she failed spectacularly.
well, yes. but she now has a much enriched resume
You may not like Elon Musk but he's doing remarkably well for someone who is "clearly off the rails".
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> her legacy will forever be stained
Interesting. My hot take is 99% of the time non-founder CEOs end up on the dustbin of history, successful or unsuccessful.
Terry Semel. John Akers. John Sculley, Carly Fiorina. Except among those of us in tech, all are now long forgotten failures. Even Gil Amelio, who made one of the most genius acquisitions ever, was fired and his name lost to the sands of time. My bet is nobody's going to remember Tim Cook or Sundar or Satya in 50 years, maybe even 20.
Possibly the only non-founder CEO who has made a real legacy in the last 100 years is Elon. I would also say TJ Watson Jr. but I very much wonder if that many HN commenters know who he is!
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Really good call out. Hitting someone from above & below seems not quite square.
In my view, there was plenty of opportunity to make a mark & do things, even with a ultra involved Musk.
But this person didn't bring much product leadership, didn't have a vision for the product. Having good business relationships might have been its own core competency, but whether Linda's fault or no, suing and going after businesses to try to score some vengeance for your own terrible behavior, and maybe coerce some people back: that's a terrible tactless look, that one would hope a leader like Linda could have helped steer away from.
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I don't think she ever was a fall guy, Elon run a poll on should someone else be CEO of Twitter and lost the poll. It was quite entertaining, He didn't seem happy with the outcome and probably had to pay CEO level salary due to the stunt.
"The glass cliff is a hypothesized phenomenon in which women are more likely to break the "glass ceiling" (i.e. achieve leadership roles in business and government) during periods of crisis or downturn when the risk of failure is highest."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_cliff
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You might have a point if he didn't ignore every other one of those polls he ran.
She was mainly brought on to fix relationships with advertisers, they were just pulling out that time because of rampant nazi and hate speech (by users) on the platform, after they fired the content moderation teams. I think she did what she could over the last 2 years and some of the ad revenue came back, but after the latest MechaHitler escapades I guess she got some texts from people...
Twitter valuation dropped for two primary reasons:
1) Most tech valuations dropped about 50%-80% in between Elon's offer and Reddit formally accepting it. This was the end of the 2021 tech boom.
2) Elon being a moron and turning off brand advertisers in any way he can when direct response ads don't really work on the platform.
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> The most immaterial and inconsequential hire ever.
I understand she did convince a lot of advertisers to come back and provided a veneer of credibility.
Given the circumstances, is an 80% drop that bad? Many people were expecting Twitter to simply go bankrupt. Perhaps she's the one that saved Twitter.
> the valuation dropped 80% and they were suing advertisers for not advertising
That already happened before she got onboard.
> One time they let her speak publicly it turned out to be a disaster.
One time? She has spoken publicly many times. Care to share more about what you are referring to? I have no recollection of such a thing being done by her.
It's not easy to recover from your unpredictable boss shouting "FU" to your advertisers from a stage.
Genuinely, I wasn't even aware that Musk had actually done the initially promised thing of appointing a different CEO.
Top executives fail upwards. She did exactly what she set out to do.
Hiring her would be a favour to Elon. She likely knew this when she took the job.
She got her bag and got out. Seems perfectly rational to me.
if she had no power to make decisions then how would the company's decline in valuation be her fault?
it didnt drop 80%:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/mar/19/value-elo...
Even if the valuation is the same (seems unlikely), a fairly small rate of inflation on that sum of money is likely to be a number that matters.
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> One time they let her speak publicly it turned out to be a disaster.
Context?
So you are saying Elon musk is inept?
We all know who wanted to sue advertisers, we aren't stupid.
You’re saying two things:
- she is inept
- she never had any say (which I interpret, perhaps incorrectly, that she is competent but had her hands were tied)
Which is it?
Arguably a competent person wouldn't have persisted in a role where it was obvious they were not able to make a meaningful difference.
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My guess of what they meant; On the assumption she had influence she was unable to use that influence prevent a collapse in value. It's a hedge to cover both options.
Influencing the person pulling the strings is also a key skill. I won’t colour her entire person as inept but perhaps, wrong person wrong time. Musk doesn’t like or need yes men but if you say no him or want to try something different, you better have a well thought out idea/plan. There lies the challenge. How do you impress upon a very intelligent individual ever so often? Very few can.
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Bullshit. Look how normal it is for people on X to cens*r c*rtain w*rds to avoid having their posts downranked.
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> Top executives regularly come and go at Mr. Musk’s various companies. One exception is Gwynne Shotwell, the president of SpaceX, who joined Mr. Musk’s rocket company shortly after its founding in 2002.
That's an amazingly long tenure under Musk. And considering SpaceX's success, she must be an exceptional leader.
I wonder what people like her who were around Musk in the early days think of him now. It’s striking how much he’s changed. When I see videos of him speaking 20, even 10 years ago, he seems much more grounded, inspired, maybe even intellectual.
Something has happened to him I feel. Maybe drugs brought out the storm inside that was always there.
It's also possible he hasn't changed much as a person and just stopped listening to his personal branding advisors.
history shows that becoming extremely wealthy and powerful often changes people in bad ways
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She didn’t do nothing there
She was still there?
I didn't even know that Twitter had a CEO that wasn't Musk.
Twitter CEO - Chief Excuse Offerer
Oh I really imagined that it said that she was leaving twitter (not calling it X) as in leaving the account / social media / platform (not the company)
I would prefer if we could have a little more clarity but hey, It was funny reading in that way too.
What an utter joke this whole CEO-in-name-only setup has been since Day 1. Glad she is finally seeing the light.
The AP News story[1] had a tidbit I missed:
Yaccarino is obviously not Executive Of The Year, but what are you supposed to do when your boss is even more reckless and stupid than Donald Trump? I'm surprised it took this long.
[1] https://apnews.com/article/x-ceo-linda-yaccarino-elon-musk-g...
Yeah, never understood why she took this job. It could only really end one way.
I'd take a pretty shitty job for $6 million dollars a year in salary before bonuses. Especially when everyone knows I'm not the one actually making the decisions so all the failures can get laid at someone else's feet (appropriately).
* X reported 2024 adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization of about $1.25 billion and annual revenue of $2.7 billion.*
It is perhaps just a coincidence that this happened the day after “Mecha-Hitler” Grok going on racist screeds and going into lurid sexual fantasies about her in particular for the whole world to see. But it does look bad.
I really would not be surprised if "being sexually harassed by MechaHitler" was the last straw.
I believe that would be the line for me. Personally, anyway.
this is just a bottom of the drawer news they could pick the time to release (as all comments here prove, the hiring, the duration, and the firing, were all inconsequential for anything whatsoever)
So, why fire now? What news would be getting attention instead, of the 600 comments here and who knows how many on xitter?
edit: not sure why my ctrl-f 'grok' missed it, maybe I hadn't let the nytimes modal load thing load the bottom of the article.
how fascinating that the NY Times didn't find any room to mention in the article that despite this:
> She did not provide a reason for her departure.
it might possibly be related to the Elon's custom-tuned Grok LLM spent the last twenty four hours becoming even more Nazi-y?
seems fairly relevant especially given she didn't give any actual reason.
You didn't read the article then
> Ms. Yaccarino had discussed her plans to leave with X employees earlier this week, before the incident with Grok, two people familiar with the matter said. xAI is largely separate from X, but Grok’s responses are often widely cited — and criticized — across the platform.
Not everything is about the current news cycle.
That paragraph must have been recently edited in (and thereby validating OP's complaint) as it isn't in the archive/paywell circumventing version at https://archive.ph/9zvHZ. For those of us without a NYT subscription, can you tell us whether it puts any description to "the incident with Grok"?
The Nazi robot is probably a good signal to get out.
“prepare 3 envelopes” always leaves out the “what to do in case of Nazi robot” part.
Tangential, I still find it absurd people accept calling it X instead of Twitter. While I'd generally agree that most companies can change their name, encroaching on a basic letter should be off limits, like naming your company "The" or "God".
Still sticking with Twitter until a reasonable name is found, which by Musk is never.
I used to Find the renaming a bit ridiculous, but in light of the sweeping platform changes, I find that making the distinction between twitter, the somewhat reasonable microblog platform and x, the far-right psyops operation is useful.
Also there is some honesty in making the logo a half-drawn swastika.
> like naming your company "The" or "God".
or naming a product "Word" or "Office" or "Windows". :)
Microsoft naming makes sense if you imagine that the person that came up with the names was stoned, like high on weed.
"Yo dude, to use the spreadsheets you've got to like excel and stuff. ", "When you make your point it's gotta be powerful. ", "Ain't my point having a database if you can't access it. ", "A: I need a tool to write my book, it's gonna change the world. B: Word bro, word. ", "Bro, you have to connect with people to expand your outlook on life, the world and stuff. ".
Those can be easily identified as "Microsoft Word", "Microsoft Office" and "Microsoft Windows". However "X" is the name of the company and the product.
I guess you could refer to it as "X The Everything App" or using the incredibly corny and near-immediately-binned tagline "X: Blaze Your Glory!" but I've only ever seen those used by people making fun of the product, company, Elon or all three.
Microsoft is notorious for naming stuff in a way that makes it impossible to search for information. It is quite annoying.
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> While I'd generally agree that most companies can change their name, encroaching on a basic letter should be off limits
To me it's the other way around. If the platform had been named X from the start, then a language would have developed around it, including what its messages are called, or what verb is used to refer to posting a message. We, the public, wouldn't have known any better. With Twitter, we do know better — better name, better nouns, better verbs (even a better logo; but that's by the by). Bosses can rename their products as much as they like; it's just surprising to me that we as a public so obligingly give up this tiny bit of our language.
> like naming your company "The" or "God".
Consider truth social :-) I am amazed people agree to call the messages there 'truths', and reposts, 'retruths'. So embarrassing.
"Tweets" was already an embarrassing term. We used to be fine with just "posts" or "comments" instead of trying to put the company branding in every term.
> Consider truth social :-) I am amazed people agree to call the messages there 'truths', and reposts, 'retruths'. So embarrassing.
The most Orwellian shit ever.
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> If the platform had been named X from the start, then a language would have developed around it, including what its messages are called, or what verb is used to refer to posting a message.
I'm not really sure. Some things don't compound, that's why I think a preposition for instance would make a bad name. But even if you may be right, I still want to put up a fight against corporate entities trying to take over basic concepts (X, the unknown, the letter that marks the spot, etc.). I don't want to be forced to use your name if your name is an absurdity, the same way I can't make a brand called "Trump is an idiot" (even if it's true).
I wonder if the purpose of naming it „X“, just like naming „Facebook“ meta is to do the opposite of SEO: Make it harder to find news pertaining to the company and their scandals.
A UK politician lay down in the House of Commons in order to fill the search indices with "Jacob Rees-Mogg lying"
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/politics/jacob-reesmogg-admi...
Facebook is still called Facebook.
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Shed Simove actually did this, with some funny results: https://www.shedsimove.com/content/i-changed-my-name-god
Same with Facebook / Meta; the "metaverse" they tried to pivot the company to cost them billions and failed spectacularly. Google is still Google, not Alphabet, although separating the overarching org from the search engine / internet services branch was logical. They tried to pivot to social media with Circles, upheaving the whole company. The only good thing that (from an outsider's POV anyway) came out of that was unifying their logins across services.
I agree but given that the original twitter logo was a bird, It's nice to call it an "Ex Twitter" (Cf. Monty Python's dead parrot sketch)
I like to call it X-Twitter.
In a way it is correct, since when spoken it sounds like you're saying ex-twitter.
How about B, C, C++, C#, D?
It sounds like you have a chip on your shoulder.
It's interesting how things change. Internet used to be against copyright and for the right to choose how to call oneself. And now it's for copyright and against the self naming thing.
I'm actually for self-naming in general, it's just that there should be some common sense limits to self-naming. There's a reason why we differentiate between common and proper nouns.
The worst part, in my opinion, is that people fell for it. Instead of hearing a split second two syllable "twitter", we now keep hearing "X, formerly known as twitter".
That's 8 syllables. You just gave 4x free advertisement for absolutely no good reason. You're the sucker.
I like to shorten it to ex-twitter. Pun intended of course.
She's the ex-CEO of a private company owned by a billionaire. What power did she really have?
If the company was still public, then all the stupid shit Elon Musk did would put her in a much stronger place as the adult in the room during board meetings.
The things done to Twitter since it became X is a form of cultural vandalism that should never be forgotten in the history of the web. It will be a cautionary tale for decades to come.
Gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/09/technology/linda-yaccarin...
TIL you can "gift" NYTimes articles access. Sounds weird but thanks stranger!
Edit: and to pay back (?), https://archive.is/Cn2hA
She was never in charge of anything at X, the title is doing a disservice to the public.
She is leaving the company, not the platform
True. It's a misleading headline.
Some non-paywalled sources:
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/07/09/tech/linda-yaccarino-step...
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx2gy3j9xq6o
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jul/09/x-ceo-ste...
etc
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They had literally added (and now removed) a system prompt to be politically incorrect. I'm sure no other LLM has that.
https://github.com/xai-org/grok-prompts/commit/c5de4a14feb50...
I suspect it has more to do with alignment fine-tuning.
The other LLMs don't have a "disbelieve reputable sources" unsafety prompt added at the owner's instructions.
It's gotta be more than that too though. Maybe training data other companies won't touch? Hidden prompt they aren't publishing? Etc.
Clearly Musk has put his hand on the scale in multiple ways.
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Tbf, it must be difficult for LLMs to align all the WWII propaganda that's still floating around.
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All LLM's are capable of producing really vile completions if prompted correctly -- after all, there's a lot of vile content in the training data. OpenAI does a lot of work fine tuning them to steer them away from it. It's just as easy to fine tune them to produce more.
In fact, there was an interesting paper showed that fine tuning an LLM to produce malicious code (ie: with just malicious code examples in response to questions, no other prompts), causes it to produce more "evil" results in completely unrelated tasks. So it's going to be hard for Musk to cherry pick particular "evil" responses in fine tuning without slanting everything it does in that direction.
Could you use one LLM to filter out such bad training data before using it to train another one? Do they do this already?
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I guess the Nazi chatbot was the last straw. Amazed she lasted this long, honestly.
As chief, her job is, amongst others, making sure that type of thing doesn’t happen.
Outcomes suggests she failed at that.
Hopefully the next chief will be better.
She was was never the chief, only the chief's main administrator.
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Her only true role was to fulfill Musk's silly promise to step down as CEO after a public vote. https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1604617643973124097
You don't think Elon went behind her back constantly? You think the next CEO will have more to say? She pretended to be in charge, she got paid, good for her. What are you hoping for. X is a dump, and the sooner it goes away the better for everybody.
She was CEO of X which was sold to xAI. I'm not sure she had any control over Grok.
Physical restraint is the only thing that would stop him and I imagine he rolls with security so…
There's only one way to stop Elon Musk from doing erratic, value-destroying things like that, and that's to ambush him in the parking lot with a tire iron.
Yaccarino doesn't strike me as the type.
I'm surprised the NYT article does not even mention it.
The NYT had already sourced that she was leaving prior to the Grok incident, so they knew it was not the primary reason. Apparently, she has been planning on leaving since the takeover by xAI.
Hasn't the bot done that thing before? And she stayed?
The bot has said fairly horrendous stuff before, which would cross the line for most people. It had not, however, previously called itself 'MechaHitler', advocated the holocaust, or, er, whatever the hell this is: https://bsky.app/profile/whstancil.bsky.social/post/3ltintoe...
It has gone from "crossing the line for most ordinary decent people" to "crossing the line for anyone who doesn't literally jerk off nightly to Mein Kampf", which _is_ a substantive change.
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Not at this level, no.
6mil a year for a job where she has no power why even show up...
What is the Nazi chatbot?
Grok, the xAI chatbot, went full neo-nazi yesterday:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jul/09/grok-ai-p...
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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44504709 ("Elon Musk's Grok praises Hitler, shares antisemitic tropes in new posts"—16 hours ago; 89 comments)
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grok yesterday.
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Related discussions from the past 12 hrs for those catching up:
Elon Musk's Grok praises Hitler, shares antisemitic tropes in new posts
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44507419
see here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44510635
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Not defending Elon or the infobot but my theory is that by leaving that LLM unfiltered people have learned how to gamify and manipulate it into having a fascist slant. I could even guess which groups of people are doing it but I will let them take credit and it's not likely actual neo-nazi's, they are too dumb and on too many drugs to manipulate an infobot. These groups like to LARP to piss everyone off and they often succeed. If I am right it is a set of splintered groups formerly referred to generically as The Internet Hate Machine but they have (d)evolved into something worse that even 4chan could not tolerate.
It's just the prompt: https://github.com/xai-org/grok-prompts/commit/c5de4a14feb50...
People who don't understand llms think saying don't shy away from making claims that are politically incorrect means it won't PC. In reality saying that just makes things associated with politically incorrect more likely. The /pol/ board is called politically incorrect, the ideas people "call" politically incorrect most of all are not Elon's vague centrist stuff it's the extreme stuff. LLMs just track probable relations between tokens, not meaning, it having this result based on that prompt is obvious.
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> it's not likely actual neo-nazi's, they are too dumb to manipulate an infobot.
No they are not. There exist brilliant people and monkeybrains across the whole population and thus the political spectrum. The ratios might be different, but I am pretty sure there exist some very smart neo-nazis
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It sure didn’t seem to take much manipulation from what I saw. “Which 20th century figure would solve our current woes” is pretty mild input to produce “Hitler would solve everything!”
I'm out of the loop, why is it an "infobot" and not a chatbot?
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> Not defending Elon or the infobot but my theory is that by leaving that LLM unfiltered people have learned how to gamify and manipulate it into having a fascist slant.
We don't need a theory that explains how Grok got a fascist slant, we know exactly what happened: Musk promise to remove the "woke" from Grok, and what's left is Nazi. [1]
[1] https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2025/07/08/tech/grok-ai-antisemitism
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That LLM is incredibly filtered, just in a different way from others. I suspect by "retraining" the model Elon actually means that they just updated the system prompt, which is exactly what they have done for other hacked in changes like preventing the bot from criticizing Trump/Elon during the election.
No, that's definitely not what happened. For quite a while Grok actually seemed to have a surprisingly left-leaning slant. Then recently Elon started pushing the South African "white genocide" conspiracy theory, and Grok was sloppily updated and started pushing that same conspiracy theory even in unrelated threads. Last week Elon announced another update to Grok, which coincided with this dramatic right-wing swing in Grok's responses. This change cannot be blamed on public interactions like Microsoft's Tay, it's very clearly the result of a deliberate update, whether or not these results were intentional.
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hot diggity dog
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deranged. "far left" is anything you don't agree with. also, almost none of the people from before musk are actually gone, the only difference is a dramatic increase in antisocial nazi bots and the groypers being more bold.
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surely there are better things to be commenting on?
You're jealous!
Old advice: If you have nothing good to say, best to say nothing at all.
Who?
So dumb some people call it "X"
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Who cares? What I’m curious about is if Elon will pay her what she must have negotiated: a golden parachute.
Linda's tenure was an overwhelming success if you judge it according to what her assigned goals probably were:
1) Moved X out of woke censorship into a highly liberal (in the permissive sense of the word) free speech platform, while at the same time...
2) Improved the X brand safety such that nearly all advertisers are back on the platform.
We forget how much at odds these two goals were a couple years ago, but the overton window has shifted a lot since then so it doesn't seem as big a deal.
Her tenure was an "overwhelming success" if you don't know what either of those words mean.
Point number 2, was a great success with a controversial owner.
discord is manned in 20s-30s employee, valve who makes steam is also has small number of team
if you thinking you need 500s employee or something well you are wrong since many company do this for a long time and still do well
for example they fire legal team division and offload that into external agency
they just fire all "administration" related people and keep the bulk of engineering team which they should since tech company being lean is most advantage of tech company has
I assume he's reviving a new drive at internal consolidation and reviving the internal efficiency of X. This would be a good start considering this CEO's track record so far. She served a certain purpose and it's workable to replace her.
As for Musk's ownership of X itself, and his buying it: If I had been in his shoes, i'd have tried to squeeze for a lower price maybe, but the company was a worthwhile acquisition and the future is too long, with too many complex turns for anyone to clearly say whether his ownership of it is a business failure or a long-view piece of wisdom. What he controls now is still relevant, and if certain political/social winds change, could be more relevant still down the road. In either case, it could easily be a valuable political and business tool for Musk himself, for many years to come.
I simply don't see the destructiveness and failure that many people, here on this site and elsewhere have ranted about with Musk buying Twitter. Even with the firings and brand change, well, how necessary did those staffers end up being? Not much as it turns out. Better to have gotten rid of them during the initial chaos of a handover, when you can in any case expect problems from all corners, and then work on rebuilding with a fresh and company-aligned base that works to ensure stability down the road.
Being the richest man in the world, and one who has already assembled two consecutive historically noteworthy companies (Tesla and SpaceX), Musk is certainly not stupid even if his personality can be grotesque at times, some of the comments here claiming otherwise have no rational fucking clue what they're talking about. They speak from emotion, perhaps driven by ideological fixation, but not based on the visible evidence over multiple decades.
Why not respond with an actual rebuttal of these points instead of downvoting? Are you 12-year-old schoolkids?
I don't think anyone has any interest in "debating" you. Personally, I don't get into arguments with people who do not seem connected to reality. There is no point in it. That seems like the sort of thing a 12 year old would do. You'd probably find more purchase with your arguments at an adolescent playground anyway.
>I simply don't see the destructiveness and failure that many people, here on this site and elsewhere have ranted about with Musk buying Twitter.
Did you not see Grok yesterday? Or the general proliferation of disgusting racism all over X since Musk took over? No? Oh well. Hence, my point about reality.
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