CEO of X steps down in huge blow to Elon Musk

The CEO of Elon Musk's social media platform X has announced she is stepping down.

Linda Yaccarino was hired by Musk in May 2023 after he bought Twitter - which he later renamed X - for $44billion (£32billion) in late 2022. At the time, the Tesla billionaire said the CEO's role would be focused mainly on running the company's business operations, leaving him to focus on product design and new technology.

When she accepted the job, the ad executive was taking on the challenge of getting big brands back to advertising on the social media platform after months of upheaval following Musk's takeover, amid concerns that his thinning of content restrictions was enabling hateful and toxic speech to flourish. Two years later, those concerns have not subsided, as a recent update to Grok led to a flood of anti-Semitic commentary from the chatbot this week that included praise of Adolf Hitler.

READ MORE: MIKEY SMITH: 7 unhinged Donald Trump moments as Elon Musk's AI chatbot Grok goes full Nazi

Ms Yaccarino, a former NBCUniversal advertising executive, didn't reveal the reason why she decided to step down. The announcement comes after the social media platform's AI bot praised Hitler, however it's not clear whether this has in any way affected her decision to quit her job.

Announcing her resignation today, she posted: "After two incredible years, I’ve decided to step down as CEO of X. When @elonmusk and I first spoke of his vision for X, I knew it would be the opportunity of a lifetime to carry out the extraordinary mission of this company. I'm immensely grateful to him for entrusting me with the responsibility of protecting free speech, turning the company around, and transforming X into the Everything App."

She added: "I'm incredibly proud of the X team - the historic business turn around we have accomplished together has been nothing short of remarkable. We started with the critical early work necessary to prioritize the safety of our users - especially children, and to restore advertiser confidence. This team has worked relentlessly from groundbreaking innovations like Community Notes, and, soon, X Money to bringing the most iconic voices and content to the platform. Now, the best is yet to come as X enters a new chapter with @xai.

"X is truly a digital town square for all voices and the world's most powerful culture signal. We couldn't have achieved that without the support of our users, business partners, and the most innovative team in the world. I'll be cheering you all on as you continue to change the world."

After Grok began praising Hitler, referring to itself as MechaHitler and making anti-Semitic comments in response to user queries, Musk's artificial intelligence firm xAI said it was deleting "inappropriate" posts. "We are aware of recent posts made by Grok and are actively working to remove the inappropriate posts," the Grok account posted on X early Wednesday, without being more specific.

It added: "Since being made aware of the content, xAI has taken action to ban hate speech before Grok posts on X. xAI is training only truth-seeking and thanks to the millions of users on X, we are able to quickly identify and update the model where training could be improved."