She defended the platform as advertisers fled. She echoed her boss Elon Musk’s talking points, sometimes twisting data and ducking responsibility. And she reportedly leaned into tactics that blurred ethical lines. She wasn’t just along for the ride. At times, she helped steer it. 

Needless to say, her resignation didn’t come as a surprise. If anything, the question is why it took this long. Since she arrived in the summer of 2023, her job has been less about leading a business than containing a crisis — serving as a kind of reputational buffer between Musk’s erratic behavior and the advertising community he’d all but alienated.

But buffers don’t last forever. And once X was formally folded into Musk’s AI venture xAI earlier this year, her CEO role was effectively reduced to leading what amounted to the social wing of a much larger, founder-dominated project.

By the end, the brevity of  Musk’s response to her exit matched the reality of her role. Yaccarino announced her leave in an X post on Wednesday, and Musk’s only response on the matter was to reply to her post stating: “Thank you for your contributions.”

X didn’t return a request for comment on Yaccarino’s departure.

“Linda’s farewell tweet is interesting to say the least, as she boldly claims success in ‘turning the company around’ and ‘restoring advertiser confidence’, neither of which is true,” said Ruben Schreurs, CEO of media management firm Ebiquity. “We are again witnessing the sadly popular playbook of loudly blowing your own trumpet, claiming successes that aren’t real, never admitting to mistakes, and blaming all setbacks on other people and external factors.”

His comments echo a consensus that’s hardened over the last two years as marketers ran out of patience with the platform, with its owner and with the executive who chose to stand between them. 

“X is just a product business that has monetized poorly as an ads business,” said a senior marketer on condition of anonymity. “Most of its advertisers were the short-tail like me — not the long tail. There’s none of that there.”

It wasn’t meant to end this way. 

When Musk appointed Yaccarino in May 2023, it felt — briefly — like a rational pivot. Here was one of the advertising world’s ultimate operators: polished, pragmatic and deeply connected. Hiring someone like that was seen as a signal that Musk, having gutted Twitter and rebranded it X, might actually be ready to hand over some control and stabilize a business that was mired in a brand boycott. 

And for a moment, it seemed like it might work.

For about five months, there were signs of momentum. Employees praised her impact internally. The company appeared to be moving — however unevenly — toward restoring structure. The message to advertisers started to take a more measured tone. 

“I like the new vibe at the office much better than the old one now,” said an exec who worked with the company’s ad sales team. “I think it’s just more clear what goal they’re going after. And they work more together. There were more [staff] inside of the office. So there’s just more energy and it felt quite good.”

But that assumption now feels quaint. If Musk’s leadership of X was chaotic, Yaccarino’s tenure added a new layer: she was tasked with wooing back advertisers while Musk continued to post conspiracies, elevate extremist accounts and enmesh X with his personal politics and emerging AI ambitions.

To some, this may still seem like a harsh read. After all, there’s an argument that she delivered: X’s ad revenue is projected to return to growth in 2025, after plummeting by more than half following Musk’s takeover, according to eMarketer. But then look at how that recovery was engineered.

Yaccarino and Musk led a “strong-arm” effort, threatening legal action against advertisers who paused spending after the takeover, according to The Wall Street Journal. X filed an antitrust lawsuit against the World Federation of Advertisers and major brands like Unilever, CVS, Mars, Lego and Pinterest — accusing them of participating in an “illegal boycott”. Some advertisers were dropped from those suits only after returning to the platform. Others reportedly feared political retaliation. IPG, for instance, to risk delays in federal merger approvals if it didn’t fall back into line. 

So yes, the ad dollars did start to trick back. But not necessarily out of renewed confidence in the platform. Often, it was out of caution. Sometimes fear. And rarely at the scale that mattered.

“X’s ad business is recovering, but some of the tactics the company has reportedly used to get advertisers to spend are questionable at best,” said Jasmine Enberg, vp and principal analyst, social media and creator economy at eMarketer. “Fear or intimidation can work in the short term, but it’s not a sustainable tactic.”

Which is why the comeback feels more like a technical rebound than a real recovery. According to Guideline, ad spending over the first half of the year is up 62% versus the same period a year ago. But growth off a crater always looks steeper. The platform is still playing in a smaller league. In 2022, the year Musk acquired it, the micro-blogging site made around $4.73 billion, according to eMarketer. This year, it’s expected to make $2.26 billion. 

And that’s the real story of Yaccarino’s tenure at X: it didn’t have to go this way. 

There were moments — fleeting, but real — when it looked like that different outcome was possible. Around the X Council meetings, in particular, a glimpse of what could have started to take shape. Those gatherings brought together advertisers, agency execs and media owners, offering a structured forum where brand concerns were acknowledged, if not always addressed. Yaccarino looked comfortable in that role: the connected, the negotiator, the grown-up in the room actually doing the work.

“She’s magnetic. She’s everything you’d want a struggling company to have from a leadership perspective,” said one ad exec who attended one of those meetings. “She’s brilliant. You’re immediately almost enthralled with her and want to trust everything she says. You genuinely buy into her, and the team has bought into her.” 

If that version of Yaccarino had prevailed — the one where marketers were heard and brand safety wasn’t treated like a punchline — then yes, maybe she could’ve turned the business around. The right way.

Because when she had space to operate, Yaccarino moved. In her first year, she introduced an ad revenue share model for creators as well as partnerships with the likes of Khloe Kardashian and Serena Williams. She brokered brand safety partnerships with DoubleVerify and Integral Ad Science. She secured entertainment deals with the NBA and WWE, to name a few. She even reinstated the transparency report for the first time since 2021. In her second year, she showed up at Cannes as X CEO, holding advertiser meetings from a suite at the Carlton hotel. And that was just the highlight reel.

But for every hit, there were louder misses.

From Musk telling advertisers to “go fuck themselves” onstage, the lawsuits, to the platform’s alignment with political extremes, and what was supposed to be her “coming out party” at 2023’s Code Conference but turned into a flop — having to justify her bosses actions and defending the business — each step forward came with a handful of steps back.

“As horrible as this may sound, I don’t think anything went well,” said Shamsul Chowdhury, global evp of social at Jellyfish. “X is still not considered a top tier ad platform and I know it’s unfair to think Linda could have changed that perception in two years, but I don’t think X has done anything to even remotely get advertisers interested.

What happens next isn’t really about succession. X doesn’t need a new CEO because the title itself doesn’t mean much. Musk remains the decision-maker. And if this week’s news proves anything, it’s that the era of trying to reconcile X’s identity as both tech company and media business is over. 

In the end, Yaccarino was caught between two incompatible realities: the logic of corporate advertising and the logic of Musk. The former required consistency, guardrails and trust. The latter demand none of those things. 

She tried to manage both. Now, she doesn’t have to.