Linda Yaccarino took an impossible job. And she failed at it.
That’s my tweet-length summary of Yaccarino’s two-year run at Twitter/X, which she announced via her own Twitter post Wednesday.
The longer version of my analysis isn’t much longer.
In 2023, Elon Musk brought on Linda Yaccarino to fix his ad business, which he himself had broken after buying Twitter in 2022. And as long as Elon Musk owns Twitter, no one can fix his ad business: It’s not big enough to be a must-buy for most advertisers, and his ownership generates potential headaches for any advertiser who thinks about investing money there. It’s easier to ignore it, which is what most advertisers do.
Rather than enumerate all of Musk’s erratic approaches to advertising sales — No. 1 on the list, of course, remains his famous “go fuck yourself” pitch back in 2023 — let me sum it up this way: For years, Elon Musk was told that if he just toned down his behavior on his platform, he might have an easier time getting reputation-conscious brands to spend money with him. Instead, he sued them.
But earlier this year, faced with the prospect that his behavior was tanking sales at Tesla — the company that’s made him the richest man in the world — he at least made gestures to respond, telling anyone who would listen that he was going to spend less time on politics and more time running the automaker. (Whether he’ll follow through is another matter.)
That is: If Musk really wanted to make Twitter an ad business, he could have tried. Instead, he kept on doing what he was doing and hoped Yaccarino could clean up his mess.
“Elon found the requests and requirements to get advertisers back to be tedious,” says Lou Paskalis, an ad industry veteran who now works as a consultant via his AJL Advisory business. “But if he wants to understand why advertisers haven’t returned, he should look in the mirror.”
I asked X for comment, but haven’t heard back.
Whether Yaccarino could have done better is a different question. At times, she seemed to channel her new bosses’ penchant for fighting with enemies real and imagined — like her bizarre onstage appearance at the Code Conference in 2023. At other times, she seemed committed to using her Rolodex to work with big brands that would still do business with Twitter, like the NFL.
You can also debate whether she should have taken the job at all. Remember that Musk essentially announced her hire while she was still at her old job, running ad sales at NBCUniversal, which forced her out right before a crucial sales event. If that’s how your new boss treats you before you start your new gig, imagine what it’s going to be like when you’re actually employed there?
In retrospect, it seems clear that Musk himself has grown tired of even pretending that Twitter will make real money from advertising. While Yaccarino described her tenure there as a “historic business turnaround,” documents the company sent to investors this year suggest that, at best, the company was generating operating profits similar to what it had earned before Musk’s takeover — but that ad revenue was still way down since his purchase.
But the people who gave Musk money this year didn’t really care about its ad business, either — they were interested in Twitter’s relationship with xAI, Musk’s OpenAI competitor.
That became even clearer in March, when Musk announced that xAI had “bought” Twitter. From an investor’s perspective, it’s a no-brainer: Who cares about the fortunes of a subscale social media platform, compared to the upside of a Musk-owned AI company during an AI boom?
That deal may also explain why Musk had almost nothing to say in response to Yaccarino’s departure post, beyond a pro forma “thank you for your contributions” response. He’s moved on. Now she has, too.
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