Comment by CyberMacGyver
3 days ago
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.
One would imagine that a CEO lacking power is the precise reason a company would perform poorly.
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> she was not to blame.
Fall guys bear some of the blame in the fall.
My long-held [0] personal theory - borne out by everything Musk has done, and by who bought Twitter - is that it was bought to curb the possibility of large positive social movements along the lines of OWS or BLM.
Enabling that can entail being useless at your supposed job, while doing your actual job (which deserves some amount of blame, from a number of perspectives).
0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36685384
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I don't think she is entirely to blame, but I think there is some blame for not standing up to Musk and leading better.
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GP is specifically responding to
> Remarkably inept.
She did exactly what she was hired for. The plan was terrible, but she executed it as well as expected. It's hard to see any ineptitude.
She shut her mouth and didn’t cause trouble.
It is possible that people think that the valuation would be even worse if she wasn't the CEO. Unlikely, but possible.
> Valuation did drop during her tenure
Valuation also bounced back during her tenure.
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> her legacy will forever be stained
Where can I sell my legacy for $6 million/year?
> Where can I sell my legacy for $6 million/year?
I know you meant your comment as sarcasm, but to do it, you need to have a legacy worth those kind of numbers to begin with, instead of selling your labor as most of us here do. It's not so different that celebrities associating themselves with brands through advertising.
And as distasteful as it seems to many of us, people like her spend years building their social networks and a reputation for various personality and behavioral traits in a boardroom.
Also, I doubt her legacy is closed at this point. The traditional next step would be to write a book based on her career capped off by her experiences at Twitter.
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My question is where does she go from here?
Like if she became my CEO, I'd really worry about my company/job.
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I will do it for half that price....
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Meta
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.
Do you not think someone who ran the ad department at NBC has a reputation?
"Legacy" doesn't mean "guy-on-the-street's perception of you."
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If you have enough money, any age can be retirement age. The whole concept of "retirement" is really for the working class anyway.
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.
Shotwell is amazing. She runs SpaceX, which is rocket science, and she has to manage Musk, which is harder than rocket science.
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.
Oh sure, I have no doubt she can get another cushy job if she wants it. I just mean that she has revealed herself as a coward at best, and a deplorable snake at worst.
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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?
I'm not suggesting she should be thanked. I'm suggesting that the failures listed are hard to ascribe to her ineptitude.
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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".
Yes, corruption pays. Although if "doing remarkably well" means being addicted to ketamine, having many exes and children who refuse to speak with you, tanking multiple businesses to the point that your products get sabotaged just for being associated with you, getting booed off stages, licking the boots of fascists in the hope they'll let you call them "daddy", paying people to play online games for you to impress nerds (unsuccessfully, instead getting online-bullied for it), etc., etc., then I think I'd rather not "do remarkably well", thank you very much.
Elon does not seem like a happy man. Is money the only points humans score themselves by? It's like watching someone bragging about getting the highest ever score at a game that they hate.
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Like, financially? Sure. I don't think that was ever in dispute.
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Elon Musk is doing well now the same way Elvis Presley or Howard Hughs were doing well in their final years.
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No he isnt.
Tesla is going to down the shitter and he is trying to fool everyone that it suddenly is now an AI company lol with a disaster rollout for his taxis. Waymo is going to eat them for lunch. Driverless taxis with people overseeing things in the car lol Wow. Such autonomy. He also didnt even create the company. He basically stole it from some other guys who actually founded and built the early stages of tesla.
He doesnt and isnt capable of running SpaceX. Their current CEO and tech lead is the person who runs the business and is actually knowledgable in the space industry and space engineering. Elon? Oh he just is there for the launches.
His neuralink and xAI? lol Ok. Yes Im sure we will see a lot coming out of those businesses with most government and people know shunning his business's and himself. Oh and new version of a nazi LLM. Cant wait to use it. And Twitter. Wow so much great discourse and sensible conversation that it competes with truth social.
Yes, he is doing remarkably well because he has money. Just like Pablo escoabr had money. The leaders of Enron were also doing remarkably well for a while. What about the guy who ran that ponzi scheme? Maddof. Yes he was also doing remarkably well since no one knew the bullshit he was generating. Elon is a fraud like all these other successful people who may have created businesses but hide the bullshit well for now. One day though, it will all come crashing down. Then you and all other sheep will look like greater fools than you do now. You still have time to come to your senses. Just dont be a sheep and glorify any man or exalt him above others. Its quite simple. He is no genius. He is someone who takes advantage and exploit others for his personal gain and is more destructive to society today than he has ever been and people like you are contributing to it so congrats to screwing over other people.
> 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!
I think the founders tend to have a love for the business and a long-term plan for it. Followup CEOs are more about the stock performance and happy to sell it for parts if it serves their bonus. Sundar and Satya took all of the strengths of those respective companies and burned them to the ground. Made a lot of money doing it, stockholders love them, but they're pale husks of their former businesses.
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 this is what was happening. It's weird that people are thanking her when she functionally did nothing of value while the company has been spiraling. Either she was complicit in the whole thing, or she really did nothing at all. In either case, what is there for the users to thank?
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
Is this what happened at Reddit? I feel like they made some unpopular changes and used Ellen Pao as a patsy.
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 owner of Twitter sieg heiled twice in front of millions of viewers. There is no need for anybody else to prove anything.
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his own fucking 'ai' was nazi posting, wtf are you talking about?
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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.
"lost money due to inflation" (or even "lost money compared to an equivalent investment is a basket of similar stocks" is very different claim than "lost 80% of value". Currently the stock is down less than 10% from the purchase price (41 billion vs 44 billion).
Down 10% vs 80% is the kind of egregious factual "error" that gets made so frequently around Musk, that it is hard to take any criticism at face value. You don't like the guy and want to call him out? Get your facts straight or you're being counter productive.
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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.
Can’t speak for her, obviously, but personally I tend to wait to make my exit once I know the role is not working out
If I were in her shoes, I would have known I was going to leave during the worst of his tantrums, but I would have timed my exit for a more graceful moment.
Dramatically bailing out during a storm would not be a good look for an exec who wants another key role somewhere else
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You'd be insane to leave a job with such few responsibilities and such insane compensation. Set for life.
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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.
Isn't the X ranking algorithm open source? Does it have hardcoded keywords or how does this censoring work?
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