Elon Musk has his own clean-up crew at X: Linda Yaccarino

By Beth Kowitt

When journalists email X with an inquiry, they receive the automated response, “Busy now, please check back later.” The fact that they’re met with this fairly bland reply in their inbox and not a poop emoji, as was previously the case, is the work of Linda Yaccarino.

There is perhaps no metaphor more apt for Yaccarino’s responsibilities at X. The former TV industry ad boss holds the title of CEO, but her mandate falls more in the category of cleaning up what I’ll politely call the poop storm created by her boss Elon Musk.

Rather than help Yaccarino woo back advertisers who fled the platform in the aftermath of Musk’s acquisition of X, he told them on stage at a conference to go “f—” themselves. Rather than help her convince the company’s media partners that X was no longer a cesspool of toxic misinformation, he used the site to agree with and promote antisemitic conspiracy theories. He scooped Yaccarino on the news that he had hired her, telling the world he had brought on a new CEO before she had had the chance to notify her former employer. She learned that Musk was planning to change the name of Twitter to X like the rest of us — through a post from Musk. She has defended her boss through it all, even as he has undermined her at every turn.

At the time of her hiring, Lou Paskalis, chief strategy officer at Ad Fontes Media, tweeted what many of us were thinking: “I can say that she would be my first choice, and my only choice, to save the platform from the hands of its owner. I still cannot understand why she’d subject herself to @elonmusk, however!”

This weekend we got some answers thanks to an in-depth piece from The New York Times, which examines the dual challenges Yaccarino faces in getting X back on track and managing her erratic boss. But the most telling details of why this by all accounts competent and accomplished woman would take on such a thankless job — one that risks ruining her stellar reputation — come from her prior roles.

Before joining X, she had been passed over for the CEO job at NBCUniversal, and had her subsequent request for an expanded portfolio denied. The refusals came despite her ability to keep increasing revenue in the face of ratings and viewership declines. Before joining NBCUniversal, she had spent nearly two decades at Turner. She decided to leave that role after receiving a positive performance review that included a sexist jab: “I only wish she would stop using her high heels as a weapon.” During a 2018 interview at Davos recounting the episode, she said, “Today, you might put that under a byproduct of unconscious bias, because who would ever look at a man’s heels to say that’s why they are being aggressive or assertive or powerful.” She added, “You can’t ignore it. You have to learn how to navigate it.”

It’s hard to feel too bad for Yaccarino. She surely knew what she was getting into when she went to work for Musk. But for any woman who has tried to make it to the top of corporate America, there is likely a glimmer of recognition behind the events that drove Yaccarino out of traditional media and into X. She has opted to take the path that is so often the only one available to women who aspire to be the big boss: cleaning up the mess of another one of Silicon Valley’s boy geniuses. It’s yet another reminder that for women, power comes with an asterisk.

Back when the tech world was seeing an exodus of high-powered women, I wrote about how women in the industry tend to get cast as the adult in the room — with Sheryl Sandberg being the ur-example. Mark Zuckerberg hired her at what’s now Meta Platforms Inc. to handle what he candidly labeled “things I don’t want to.” The Zuckerberg-Sandberg pairing became a coveted model in Silicon Valley, to the point where Christa Quarles, CEO of software company Alludo, told me that once when she was looking to make a career move, she was shocked by the number of people who told her to “go be a Sheryl to someone’s Mark.” “I don’t know how many men they would have said this to,” she told me. As I wrote then, “It comes down to this: If the default for men in tech is boy genius, for senior women — particularly at the highest level — it is still way too often office mom.”

Yaccarino is the latest woman in tech to encounter this trap. She may have the CEO title, but Musk reportedly still gets the final call on decisions about engineering and content. Part of her job is performing the role of grownup — for example, forcing Musk, over his complaints, to attend a dinner with advertisers after he cursed them out on stage.

When Musk was still CEO of Twitter, he posted on the platform that he would step aside as soon as he found “someone foolish enough to take the job!” That someone ended up being Yaccarino — a woman who really wanted to be a CEO and perhaps saw no other way.