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.
sorcerer-mar · 2h ago
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.
olalonde · 38s ago
You may not like Elon Musk but he's doing remarkably well for someone who is "clearly off the rails".
josefresco · 2h ago
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.
madeofpalk · 1h ago
One would imagine that a CEO lacking power is the precise reason a company would perform poorly.
falcor84 · 35m ago
Indeed. It was such a paradoxical situation from the start, with her both reporting to Musk as the chairman and owner, while at the same time "managing" him as the CTO. I'm surprised that the charade went on for as long as it did.
ethbr1 · 34m ago
I'd imagine the paycheck helped resolve the quandary.
mandmandam · 1h ago
> 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).
> large positive social movements along the lines of OWS or BLM
Not only a laughable claim, but a harmful one. BLM led to a period of police non-aggression that raised Black homicide rates substantially, causing at least 10,000 additional Black victims. We're still in it right now so the body count is still increasing although we are finally coming out of that period of madness.
steveBK123 · 1h ago
Pretty good theory
No comments yet
harikb · 36m ago
hmm... I am drawing a parallel between your theory on 'controlled opposition' from the linked thread from 2023, to the current M vs T fight. Plausible...
woah · 12m ago
It's conspiratorial thinking to assume that everything that happens in the world is perfectly executed by omniscient villains with 20/20 hindsight. Maybe a formerly-brilliant but drug-addled rich guy just bought a social media platform with bad fundamentals at the height of its valuation and then mismanaged it while flailing around with other ventures and political adventures. Occam's razor.
ToucanLoucan · 34m ago
See my only counterpoint to this theory is Musk has a long and well documented history of being absolutely stone desperate to be cool, which is the only thing he can't buy, and he simply revels in his ownership of Twitter even as he comprehensively runs it into the ground as a business.
Now, would he be upset about such efforts being derailed as a result, or is he even slightly bothered about his website now being packed to the tits with Nazis? Absolutely not. But I do think as unbelievably cringe as it would be if true, I really think he bought the damn thing because he just wanted to be the meme lord.
Mainly I just struggle with giving him as much credit as your theory does in terms of long term planning. He's an overgrown man-child.
JohnBooty · 20m ago
I think you and the parent poster are doing a good job of describing the same thing from different angles. Both observations are true.
Musk wanted to steer culture toward his own ends as the parent poster described and he wanted to be seen as some kind of.... cool vanguard of that, as you say.
It's really different facets of the same thing, right?
mandmandam · 8m ago
> He's an overgrown man-child.
Damn near every mega-billionaire is, almost by definition. If the best thing you can come up with to do with money is make more of it at other people's expense, then you're not even close to what I'd call mentally mature.
That doesn't stop many oligarchs from making cunning plans with layers and layers of depth, or being excellent at misdirection and media manipulation - both of which Musk also has a long and well documented history of showing. It also doesn't stop them from hiring people to make and/or refine those plans. Shit, there's probably cunning bootlickers out there, like Yarvin, just pitching this shit to them all the time.
> I just struggle with giving him as much credit as your theory does in terms of long term planning
As far as plans go, "buy Twitter and destroy it because it threatens our class interests - but pretend you're doing it for free speech or whatever" isn't especially complicated. Just piss off advertisers, users, and your staff, in plausibly deniable ways. It's not like corporate media are going to call you on it.
lenkite · 1h ago
> Valuation did drop during her tenure
Valuation also bounced back during her tenure.
xnx · 2h ago
> her legacy will forever be stained
Where can I sell my legacy for $6 million/year?
danans · 1h ago
> 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.
abirch · 1h ago
My question is where does she go from here?
Like if she became my CEO, I'd really worry about my company/job.
GCA10 · 53m ago
Lots of corporate boards, university boards, nonprofit boards, etc. make room for folks like her. She understands something about social media and the digital future -- and even if that expertise doesn't impress many folks on HackerNews, it will seem quite sufficient and robust to the elderly trustees and big-donor board members of Pleurisy State University.
Being 62 is the perfect age for such roles. Young enough to climb a flight of stairs; old enough to nod appropriately to her new peers' references from the 1980s. Executive search firms will be eager to guide her into as many board roles as she might want.
rtkwe · 1h ago
Depends on how likely you think it is she's a puppet CEO for a drug crazed, edge lord, owner or if she'll actually be allowed to do the job.
pavlov · 1h ago
She’s 62 years old. She can just retire.
vintermann · 50m ago
Politics! Or maybe management consultants. Lots of consulting jobs are really just about taking the blame.
ethbr1 · 27m ago
And politics are about asigning the blame to someone else. :D
snickerdoodle12 · 1h ago
Invest the 6mil and enjoy a carefree life?
delusional · 1h ago
To some other founder/acquirer that wants to maintain control while putting somebody else in the seat.
You're acting like Elon is uniquely stupid.
NetOpWibby · 1h ago
Elon's level of stupid feels unique at first glance but then if you look at how many people elected the current president...well.
adolph · 38m ago
Which given the nature of democracy are many of the same as the people who elected the last one and the one before, etc. Are we not all snowflake-unique kinds of stupid?
My point of gratitude for today is that my level of stupid is not nearly as consequential to others as some folks'.
belter · 2h ago
I will do it for half that price....
mcphage · 1h ago
(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?
sorcerer-mar · 1h ago
I'm not suggesting she should be thanked. I'm suggesting that the failures listed are hard to ascribe to her ineptitude.
anonymars · 1h ago
Right but the point was:
> *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.
What was there to thank her for?
sorcerer-mar · 18m ago
Nothing! That's why I didn't comment on that. I commented on "remarkably inept."
jauntywundrkind · 1h ago
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.
babypuncher · 1h ago
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?
mrtksn · 1h ago
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.
bhouston · 1h ago
> 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.
odo1242 · 51m ago
Genuinely, I wasn't even aware that Musk had actually done the initially promised thing of appointing a different CEO.
reactordev · 19m ago
Top executives fail upwards. She did exactly what she set out to do.
gorwell · 9m ago
False. Linda stood up and fought for free speech during arguably its most acute crisis moment in world history when we were almost on the brink of losing it. She stepped up for all of us in the face of what seemed like insurmountable pressure from governments, advertisers, boycotters, banking institutions, and astroturfed lynch mobs.
Invictus0 · 1h ago
She got her bag and got out. Seems perfectly rational to me.
zzzeek · 41m ago
if she had no power to make decisions then how would the company's decline in valuation be her fault?
- she never had any say (which I interpret, perhaps incorrectly, that she is competent but had her hands were tied)
Which is it?
Xiol32 · 2h ago
Arguably a competent person wouldn't have persisted in a role where it was obvious they were not able to make a meaningful difference.
mingus88 · 2h ago
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
andsoitis · 1h ago
Another possibility is that she was fired.
mdasen · 1h ago
If she were trying to time it, this timing seems weird. This is literally the day after Grok kept posting anti-semitism, praising Hitler, and calling itself MechaHitler. This might not be the least graceful moment for an exit, but there were so many more graceful exit times.
bikezen · 1h ago
FTA this was announced last week to employees.
"Ms. Yaccarino had discussed her plans to leave with X employees earlier this week, before the incident with Grok"
steveBK123 · 1h ago
The speed at which replies mentioning Groks Nazi freakout get downvoted here make me really question where things are headed..
selectodude · 1h ago
All the race science phrenology bullshit is coming out of Silicon Valley. It's not a surprise to me that HN would be full of people "just reading the stats".
snickerdoodle12 · 1h ago
You'd be insane to leave a job with such few responsibilities and such insane compensation. Set for life.
ceejayoz · 32m ago
Unless you think said job is edging into "oh shit I might be part of the Nuremberg Trials II" territory.
Life got short for quite a few historical Nazis.
snickerdoodle12 · 30m ago
Sure, and I agree, but that's not really related to what GP is saying
ceejayoz · 26m ago
It's related to what you are saying. It's a non-monetary reason it'd be non-insane to leave the role; "set for life" doesn't do you much good if you're in The Hague.
snickerdoodle12 · 19m ago
No, it's not. Here, I'll repeat the context for you:
> > Arguably a competent person wouldn't have persisted in a role where it was obvious they were not able to make a meaningful difference.
> You'd be insane to leave a job with such few responsibilities and such insane compensation. Set for life.
Pay special attention to the phrasing "a role". We are not talking about specifically this role.
ceejayoz · 18m ago
> You'd be insane to leave a job with such few responsibilities and such insane compensation. Set for life.
Again: you would not be insane to do so if staying in the job has substantial non-compensation consequences. Like jail.
cjbgkagh · 2h ago
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.
sheepscreek · 2h ago
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.
leakycap · 2h ago
When I saw this news, my first thought was that she lasted about 1 year and 11 months longer than I expected after the first few weeks.
I know Twitter had many terrible aspects, but I do miss the world voice old Twitter provided for quotes that could be engaged with in an "everyone is here" kind of feeling that doesn't exist on any other platforms right now.
kylebenzle · 38m ago
Of course I hate what Elon has done to Twitter but you're feeling previously that everyone was there was an illusion brought on by massive propaganda and manipulation of the conversation. The same thing has happened to Reddit now, well it feels more inclusive and open it's actually an incredibly controlled enclosed system that only allows one specific viewpoint. Now of course to the people inside that bubble it feels like freedom but to everyone else it looks like a liberal echo chamber.
For example, when the actual owner of the at Bitcoin handle wasn't pushing the narrative that Jack Dorsey wanted they hijacked the moniker and gave it to a pro b
Blockstream (THE COMPANY THAT CONTROLS THE BITCOIN CODE BASE) individual. For most people that support Bitcoin and blockstream it looks like a victory of free speech but in reality they're just controlling more and more of the speech and kicking out anyone from the conversation who disagrees.
krunck · 3m ago
All caps don't make it true.
fkyoureadthedoc · 29m ago
> liberal echo chamber
It skews one way, but there's definitely a large diversity in opinions on Reddit that are not hard to find. It's also transitioning into an India social media site, just from sheer population numbers.
swarnie · 3m ago
Reddit really doesn't.
I commented on a particular sub (in opposition to what i think the core hivemind is there) and was immediately banned from about 30 others.
Reddit is the most insular, single minded set of communities I've seen on social media. I dont think you can claim diversity if the userbase all wall themselves off from each other with bots.
apwell23 · 25m ago
I was banned from reddit ( not subreddit) like completly banned from all of reddit because i responded to an indian post saying
"why do westerners hate indians, what did we do to them"
with
"maybe precieved as online scammers and also mass immigration into high paying jobs"
thordenmark · 18m ago
I would gladly pretend to be CEO for the kind of pay she got. Blame it all on me, I'll take the money and go retire in Hawaii.
denysvitali · 16m ago
There are probably cheaper places to retire (that will guarantee a longer retirement) than Hawaii - but your idea is good
X has been nothing short of an exercise in brand destruction. However, despite all the drama, it still stands, it still exists, and it remains relevant.
alpha_squared · 1h ago
Which really says a lot about how hard it is to leave platforms. The network effect is hard to overcome.
taurath · 52m ago
There's no technical reason that one couldn't move from platform to platform and link identities - the restrictions around IP and platform lock-in only benefit the platform owner, ensuring that competition will be stifled rather than the platform made useful for its users.
The sad part is that ad networks know more about our connections across platforms than we're allowed to.
gchamonlive · 15m ago
There is also no technical reason people have to stay, because tech isn't the problem here. The value in these platforms aren't in the range of features they provide, but the engagement between individuals and the community and the value of the information it generates.
mrweasel · 1h ago
More and more I think Musk managed to his take over of Twitter pretty successfully. X still isn't as strong a brand as Twitter where, but it's doing okay. A lot of the users who X need to stay on the platform, journalists and politicians, are still there.
The only issue is that Musk vastly overpaid for Twitter, but if he plans to keep it and use it for his political ambitions, that might not matter. Also remember that while many agree that $44B was a bit much, most did still put Twitter at 10s of billions, not the $500M I think you could justify.
The firings, which was going to tank Twitter also turned out reasonably well. Turns out they didn't need all those people.
moomin · 39m ago
I think it’s hard to conclude that the people weren’t needed given how spectacularly it tanked.
mrweasel · 35m ago
Has it tanked? X is still running, it still has millions of users.
amrocha · 25m ago
Revenue and monthly active users are still lower than in 2022, and decreasing. And thats based on estimates, because twitter doesn’t report those numbers.
reverendsteveii · 29m ago
it's worth less than half of what he paid for it, lost 30 million users and went from being the default microblog to facing real competition in daily active users from ~~bluesky~~threads (https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/07/threads-is-nearing-xs-dail...). Building what X is today from nothing would be an incredible accomplishment but building what X is today out of what Twitter was in 2022 is still a pretty miserable failure.
You can judge for yourself whether bluesky is a competitive threat.
mh- · 14m ago
That link errors ("Failed to fetch" banner on the page) for me. Perhaps hugged to death, but I would be interested in the DAUs/MAUs if they're available.
I misremembered an article from yesterday. It's threads that's catching up w twitter.
egorfine · 25m ago
Same opinion. I absolutely hate what he did to Twitter and never in my life I will call it "X" - BUT - it is thriving.
isleyaardvark · 13m ago
Estimates are that its revenue has decreased by half. Even if Musk decreased operating expenses enough to keep or even increase profits, a 50% drop in revenue is not at all a good sign for the health of business.
BolexNOLA · 23m ago
Thriving? Its valuation has tanked since his purchase and last I read they’re still actively losing users.
egorfine · 13m ago
Yes I know. But the platform has lots and lots of engagement. Stagnation did not happen. Quite the opposite.
threetonesun · 1h ago
Well sure if you give up on moderation, and close the platform to people who aren't signed in, and shut off the API then yes you didn't need the people supporting those parts of the platform.
And I guess if you consider "the place with the MechaHitler AI" as good branding there's no arguing with you that it's doing just as well as Twitter.
mrweasel · 44m ago
I don't agree with the direction Musk has set for X, but businesswise it's not doing worse. Twitter was a financial catastrophe before the take over, so you didn't need much improvement. Moderation was a financial drain, the API didn't make them any money and none of the users seems to care all that much about the platform not being open to users without an account... because they all have accounts and wasn't able to interact with you anyway.
The media seems to get a good laugh out if Grok arguing the plight of white South Africans and is fondness to Hitler, but I'm not seeing journalists and politicians leaving X in droves because of it.
greenie_beans · 24m ago
you must not know many journalists because they certainly left in droves
amrocha · 32m ago
Most of the local journalists, politicians, game devs, and open source maintainers i followed left. It’s just US national pundits, bots, and bait monetization accounts there at this point.
rockemsockem · 42m ago
I will fondly remind folks that Grok isn't even the first LLM to become a Nazi on Twitter.
Honestly I really don't think a bad release of an LLM that was rolled back is really the condemnation you think it is.
blargey · 1m ago
I don’t think the third+ flavor of “bad release” this year, of the sort nobody else in this crowded space suffers from, is as innocuous as you think it is.
And Tay was a non-LLM released a full 6 years before ChatGPT; you might as well bring up ELIZA.
amrocha · 35m ago
There’s a difference between a 3rd party twitter bot and grok. And it’s not a “bad release”, it’s been like this ever since it launched.
Funny how ChatGPT is vanilla and grok somehow has a new racist thing to say every other week.
I certainly wouldn't call it brand destruction, a lot of people returned to X and while the branding has changed, I certainly wouldn't call it brand destruction
rtkwe · 12m ago
They had managed to get a verb into relatively common speech and their revenue has collapsed since the Musk take over I'd say it's pretty thoroughly destroyed.
sixothree · 30m ago
I feel like I need to shower every time I end up there. The place is repulsive to me.
rvz · 1h ago
..and 3 years later has a combined valuation with xAI of $113B.
Those waiting for X to collapse are going to wait a lot longer than the original 6 months that it was predicted to collapse after the November 2022 takeover.
djeastm · 1h ago
>..and 3 years later has a combined valuation with xAI of $113B.
This might be like Stacey King, a Chicago Bulls player, jokingly claiming he and Michael Jordan "combined to score 70 points" on a night when Jordan scored 69 points
shortrounddev2 · 29m ago
"Dinesh, don't fall for his “aw, shucks" routine. He is a shrewd businessman, and together, we have over $20,036,000 at our disposal"
matwood · 1h ago
> ..and 3 years later has a combined valuation with xAI of $113B.
Haha...ok. I gave a bunch of stock from one of my companies to another one of my companies and made up a value during the transaction.
CyberMacGyver · 1h ago
xAI tried to raise $20 billion in equity in April but wound up with only $5 billion & had to issue $5 billion in junk bonds last week. You can value yourself $44 billion but the market doesn’t think it’s anywhere close
moomin · 36m ago
To misquote an adage: Elon Musk can stay irrational longer than I can stay solvent.
gorwell · 38m ago
X is still ground zero for news, and it saved free speech. In the fullness of time and distance it will be viewed by historians as one of the most important events in history.
pram · 15m ago
Oh for sure, it's so important we should restart the count of years to mark the significance. 2022 will be year 1, the rest 'Anno X'
rtkwe · 9m ago
Your post gets shadow banned for the word cisgender the only speech it saved was low effort trolling, misinformation and hate speech. Musk's version of free speech is just changing the dials on the moderation machines to boost speech he prefers and shadow ban speech his doesn't.
baseballdork · 26m ago
Legitimately can't tell if this is sarcasm or not. Saved free speech??
thrance · 3m ago
Looking at their other comments, I legitimately think gorwell believes what they are saying. Another insane nazi on HN, and the moderation asleep at the wheel as always.
gorwell · 6m ago
Yes, it did. Every large platform including Twitter was censoring its users due to state pressure. Even Facebook has since admitted that they were told to censor information that was true, and they knew to be true.
elAhmo · 32m ago
She was never in charge of anything at X, the title is doing a disservice to the public.
eviks · 1h ago
> I’m immensely grateful to him for entrusting me
But he didn't? She wasn't even in the loop for many of the consequential decisions
rwmj · 1h ago
Rule #0 is you don't disparage the company on the way out. She may even have a contractual obligation not to.
ceejayoz · 56m ago
Even barring a contractual obligation, "do I want to be the target of an angry tweetstorm that might result in real death threats" is a consideration.
TechDebtDevin · 51m ago
Just wait until Musks enters his "John Mcaffee in exile(but with much more resources)" era, which I think is going to come soon. Then all these people will talk.
Or maybe his "Howard Hughes in Hiding" era. Remains to be seen which route he takes. Could also be "Rasputen shot in the ** era" if hes not careful.
libraryatnight · 1h ago
"This has been wonderful but it's time to step away and spend some time with family" lol
eviks · 1h ago
"him" is not a company. Also not saying isn't disparaging.
So do all the other LLMs have a "don't praise hitler" safety prompt that Musk insisted be removed from Grok or what?
ceejayoz · 1h ago
The other LLMs don't have a "disbelieve reputable sources" unsafety prompt added at the owner's instructions.
neuroelectron · 6m ago
Tbf, it must be difficult for LLMs to align all the WWII propaganda that's still floating around.
steveBK123 · 56m ago
It's gotta be more than that too though. Maybe training data other companies won't touch? Hidden prompt they aren't publishing? Etc.
Clearly Musk has put his hand on the scale in multiple ways.
overfeed · 30m ago
> Maybe training data other companies won't touch
That's a bingo. Musk invited X users to Microsoft-Tay[1] Grok by sharing "divisive facts" with Grok.
1. In 2016, Microsoft decided to let its Tay chatbot interact, and learn from Twitter users and was soon praising Hitler. They did it twice, before shutting it down permanently. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(chatbot)
thrance · 28m ago
I think they just told grok to favor conservative "sources" and it became "mechahitler" as the result.
empath75 · 17m ago
All LLM's are capable of producing really vile completions if prompted correctly -- after all, there's a lot of vile content in the training data. OpenAI does a lot of work fine tuning them to steer them away from it. It's just as easy to fine tune them to produce more.
In fact, there was an interesting paper showed that fine tuning an LLM to produce malicious code (ie: with just malicious code examples in response to questions, no other prompts), causes it to produce more "evil" results in completely unrelated tasks. So it's going to be hard for Musk to cherry pick particular "evil" responses in fine tuning without slanting everything it does in that direction.
alganet · 2h ago
Is this another case of "may this sacrifice appease the rain gods and bring forth a good harvest"?
JKCalhoun · 1h ago
Perhaps that and "Let me just disembark this sinking ship if I may…"
(Sorry she ever boarded?)
alganet · 1h ago
I mean more generally, in the sense that all public executive firings done to increase stock value (or prevent it from falling) are not that different from sacrificial cults.
> the historic business turn around we have accomplished together has been nothing short of remarkable.
I mean she’s not wrong!
layer8 · 2h ago
> As always, I’ll see you on X
So she’s not actually leaving the platform, just the company.
robertlagrant · 2h ago
Yes, I thought it meant she was deleting her Twitter account while remaining CEO!
DealFl0w · 2h ago
"Chief [Executive Officer]" isn't a role on the platform, it's a role with the company.
namenotrequired · 1h ago
The title does literally say she is leaving the platform
DealFl0w · 1h ago
Here on Hacker News, we should be good internet citizens and do more than just read the title.
nacho2sweet · 1h ago
There is a screenshot were Grok posts lurid sexual harassing stuff about her. https://x.com/highflystai/status/1942970125193547792 . Is there weird legal stuff around this with an AI? she is the CEO and it is a tool in the company and something she is supposed to "control"?
No comments yet
swarnie · 6m ago
Hotdog!
ryandrake · 28m ago
I didn't even know that Twitter had a CEO that wasn't Musk.
dekhn · 1h ago
I predicted she'd last 1 year but she made it to 2. She had effectively zero power, and a boss that constantly undermined her.
Trying to make it clear she is not responsible for MechaHitler AI as if people don't already have her number
freejazz · 5m ago
Well this is an opportunity for MechaHitler
yieldcrv · 57m ago
I sold a ton of shares on a private secondary market Starter Pack
enjoy the retirement!
justin66 · 1h ago
At least she still has her dignity.
AIPedant · 40m ago
The AP News story[1] had a tidbit I missed:
In late June, [Elon Musk] invited X users to help train the chatbot on their commentary in a way that invited a flood of racist responses and conspiracy theories.
“Please reply to this post with divisive facts for @Grok training,” Musk said in the June 21 post. “By this I mean things that are politically incorrect, but nonetheless factually true.”
Yaccarino obviously not Executive Of The Year, but what are you supposed to do when your boss is even more reckless and stupid than Donald Trump? I'm surprised it took this long.
Yeah, never understood why she took this job. It could only really end one way.
rtkwe · 4m ago
I'd take a pretty shitty job for $6 million dollars a year in salary before bonuses. Especially when everyone knows I'm not the one actually making the decisions so all the failures can get laid at someone else's feet (appropriately).
jeffbee · 2h ago
Have any of the people who noisily joined X to make a big impact fast actually had a big impact over any time frame? Remember when G. Hotz said he was going to fix Twitter search in 6 weeks, and then it turned out that G. Hotz is just another midwit like anyone else and Twitter search is still as bad as ever? Yaccarino said they were going to transform Twitter into the "everything app" with payments, marketplaces, and even banking. None of which it turns out was within the abilities of Linda Yaccarino.
mikepurvis · 1h ago
Not that building all that stuff is necessarily easy, but it's also not like there's a ton of product market validation or design work that's needed. Like literally the playbook is to just copy whatever the Asian superapps like WeChat/Grab/Gojek/LINE/etc are doing.
Musk has always been pretty transparent that that was his ambition for X.
euleriancon · 28m ago
I feel like most people that say WeChat is a super app haven't actually used it for any period of time. WeChat achieves their "able to do everything" by embedding sub apps within the app. Switching between them is jarring, and is sometimes less smooth than just opening a different app. Saying WeChat is a super app is like saying an app store is a super app.
add-sub-mul-div · 1h ago
Twitter is a graveyard being propped up grudgingly by people who don't want to have fewer followers elsewhere, and enthusiastically by other people as way to virtue signal alliance with the ownership's political incorrectness. It has no true value to anyone. It was going downhill already before the new ownership and for completely apolitical reasons.
bee_rider · 56m ago
It is weird that “political correctness” has been taken to mean, like, being polite and nice to people or something.
A politically correct answer is one that keeps the currently politically powerful people happy, right? Musk/Trump defined politically correct for a couple months. I guess Musk might be politically incorrect now. Are they friends or enemies today?
hollerith · 52m ago
"Politically correct" in the US context means essentially the same thing as "woke". In both cases, the word or phrase was adopted first by progressives, then by critics of progressives to refer to progressive beliefs and sensibilities.
It is surprising to find someone that doesn't know that, but would be less surprising if you don't live in the US.
bee_rider · 35m ago
> It is weird that “political correctness” has been taken to mean, like, being polite and nice to people or something.
> "Politically correct" in the US context means essentially the same thing as "woke"
I think it is (hopefully?) obvious from my comment that I actually do understand what it means in the US context, I was describing the odd situation WRT the US meaning and the origin of the phrase
> The term political correctness first appeared in Marxist–Leninist vocabulary following the Russian Revolution of 1917. At that time, it was used to describe strict adherence to the policies and principles of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, that is, the party line.
The politically correct opinions were the ones that agreed with those in power.
hollerith · 12m ago
I knew about the Soviet use, which is why I qualified with "in the US context".
Every use I've ever heard from a US speaker (certainly over 100 uses over the decades) is a reference to progressive beliefs and sensibilities regardless of whether the progressives are in power or not.
mumbisChungo · 1h ago
Change a few words and this describes every social platform including this one. Your comment is evidence, and so is this one.
meepmorp · 1h ago
> Yaccarino said they were going to transform Twitter into the "everything app" with payments, marketplaces, and even banking.
That's not really fair to Yaccarino - Musk said this and she had to repeat it because she was (nominally) CEO.
UltraSane · 1h ago
Search is a pretty solved problem if you are willing to invest the resources to create a inverted index of all the text you want to search. An inverted index of all tweets would be pretty expensive. Creating text embeddings for semantic search would be the next stage and even more expensive.
phillipcarter · 37m ago
It is very much not a solved problem. Because the implication behind search is not "well the result you need is technically in the result set", it's "the result you need as at the top", and that remains an extremely difficult problem for anything but a trivial scale.
UltraSane · 13m ago
Good support for regex and boolean operators helps a lot with that. But that requires user skill.
simonw · 1h ago
They've had an inverted index of all tweets since 2008 (when they acquired Summize).
They added a vector index a year and a half ago for a "see related tweets" feature - https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1720314092269822242 - though as far as I can tell that feature doesn't exist any more, presumably replaced by the ask Grok button.
lokar · 1h ago
Basic term based retrieval has been solved for 30+ years
The problem is ranking and relevance
lokar · 1h ago
Thinking more, I imagine each post has limited value for ranking. You need the context of the thread, re-posts, even other threads nearby in time (with the same people).
delusional · 1h ago
> turned out that G. Hotz is just another midwit like anyone else
I understand your point, but I think this sort of discourse leads people down the wrong path. G. Hotz is a pretty smart engineer. What he lacks at twitter is probably not engineering ability, but organization ability. The problem is likely not that the individual engineers aren't smart, it's that they end up working together to make each other worse than they could be.
ndiddy · 35m ago
Making big promises and then underdelivering seems like his MO in general. His AI hardware startup went from "AMD makes quality AI hardware but bad software, I'm raising money to completely rewrite the entire AMD software/driver stack to make it better for AI, how hard can it be?" to him complaining to AMD about buggy drivers and AI tooling (when the whole point of his company was throwing all that out and writing new ones from scratch) to him giving up on AMD and selling nVidia AI compute boxes like everyone else.
jeffbee · 15m ago
His M.O. and that of everyone in Elon's orbit. That's how we got DOGE: a bunch of people of well below average skills and intelligence who nevertheless believe themselves to be the masters of the universe promised to radically improve government efficiency and greatly reduce waste, but found out that the government has been wound as tightly as possible by a bunch of hardened bureaucrats who paid attention in school, know how to use slide rules, are aren't ruled by "vibes".
hocuspocus · 1h ago
After Elon fired 80% of the staff, I think we can assume that most of the organizational hurdles were effectively gone, and that it was the perfect time for a cowboy developer to jump in and fix something that would have been stopped by conservative approaches and team work before.
If search could have been solved by a single smart person, it would have been done long ago. In the Bay Area, finding a world class researcher (in distributed systems, databases, text search or whatnot) able to do a short stint at a company to tackle a hard problem isn't particularly hard.
ujkhsjkdhf234 · 2h ago
Good for her. Got paid a ton of money to be the fall guy and no one ever believed anything that went wrong with the company was her fault. That's a clean getaway in my book. Hopefully she can move on to something that isn't building Nazi chat bots.
nickthegreek · 1h ago
pretty sure she did alot of reputational damage to herself along the way.
Invictus0 · 58m ago
This is just delusional. It was obvious to everyone she was in an impossible job with a megalomaniacal boss ,and not only did she not get fired, she actually lasted 2 years and left on her own terms. I think she'll be just fine.
rsynnott · 36m ago
She _accepted_ the job, though. If we're assuming it was obvious to everyone that it was an impossible job, then her accepting it shows a certain lack of judgement, surely.
kjkjadksj · 1m ago
If your boss was a jackass would you actually turn your nose at 6m a year? I sure wouldn’t. That would set me up for life.
add-sub-mul-div · 26m ago
The reputational damage was taking the money to profit from and aid the megalomania. She'll never be taken seriously by serious people or have a substantive job again. But she'll do fine, her loyalty will probably get her similar opportunity with similar people.
jimt1234 · 1h ago
Sounds like being the manager for the Oakland... Sacramento... Unknown location Athletics. Well, minus the tons of money and Nazi chat bots. LOL
dylan604 · 9m ago
At least they are trying to name the team based on the city they are in, where the Dallas Cowboys haven't been in Dallas since the the early 70s. They trained in a city not Dallas while their stadium was in yet another not Dallas city. Now, their stadium is in yet another not Dallas city, and headquarters/training is yet a different not Dallas city.
With the A's, you could at least be close by going to the city in their name.
bananapub · 1h ago
edit: not sure why my ctrl-f 'grok' missed it, maybe I hadn't let the nytimes modal load thing load the bottom of the article.
how fascinating that the NY Times didn't find any room to mention in the article that despite this:
> She did not provide a reason for her departure.
it might possibly be related to the Elon's custom-tuned Grok LLM spent the last twenty four hours becoming even more Nazi-y?
seems fairly relevant especially given she didn't give any actual reason.
dmix · 1h ago
You didn't read the article then
> Ms. Yaccarino had discussed her plans to leave with X employees earlier this week, before the incident with Grok, two people familiar with the matter said. xAI is largely separate from X, but Grok’s responses are often widely cited — and criticized — across the platform.
Not everything is about the current news cycle.
slg · 7m ago
That paragraph must have been recently edited in (and thereby validating OP's complaint) as it isn't in the archive/paywell circumventing version at https://archive.ph/9zvHZ. For those of us without a NYT subscription, can you tell us whether it puts any description to "the incident with Grok"?
delusional · 1h ago
The Nazi robot is probably a good signal to get out.
eqmvii · 1h ago
“prepare 3 envelopes” always leaves out the “what to do in case of Nazi robot” part.
ceejayoz · 2h ago
I guess the Nazi chatbot was the last straw. Amazed she lasted this long, honestly.
andsoitis · 2h ago
As chief, her job is, amongst others, making sure that type of thing doesn’t happen.
Outcomes suggests she failed at that.
Hopefully the next chief will be better.
JohnFen · 2h ago
She was was never the chief, only the chief's main administrator.
She was CEO of X which was sold to xAI. I'm not sure she had any control over Grok.
quickthrowman · 1h ago
Physical restraint is the only thing that would stop him and I imagine he rolls with security so…
CamperBob2 · 1h ago
There's only one way to stop Elon Musk from doing erratic, value-destroying things like that, and that's to ambush him in the parking lot with a tire iron.
Yaccarino doesn't strike me as the type.
juujian · 2h ago
I'm surprised the NYT article does not even mention it.
duxup · 1h ago
Hasn't the bot done that thing before? And she stayed?
rsynnott · 32m ago
The bot has said fairly horrendous stuff before, which would cross the line for most people. It had not, however, previously called itself 'MechaHitler', advocated the holocaust, or, er, whatever the hell this is: https://bsky.app/profile/whstancil.bsky.social/post/3ltintoe...
It has gone from "crossing the line for most ordinary decent people" to "crossing the line for anyone who doesn't literally jerk off nightly to Mein Kampf", which _is_ a substantive change.
neuroelectron · 1m ago
It turns out bluesky is useful after all, as an ad hoc archive of X. Xd
ceejayoz · 1h ago
Not at this level, no.
miroljub · 2h ago
What is the Nazi chatbot?
lode · 2h ago
Grok, the xAI chatbot, went full neo-nazi yesterday:
Not defending Elon or the infobot but my theory is that by leaving that LLM unfiltered people have learned how to gamify and manipulate it into having a fascist slant. I could even guess which groups of people are doing it but I will let them take credit and it's not likely actual neo-nazi's, they are too dumb and on too many drugs to manipulate an infobot. These groups like to LARP to piss everyone off and they often succeed. If I am right it is a set of splintered groups formerly referred to generically as The Internet Hate Machine but they have (d)evolved into something worse that even 4chan could not tolerate.
People who don't understand llms think saying don't shy away from making claims that are politically incorrect means it won't PC. In reality saying that just makes things associated with politically incorrect more likely. The /pol/ board is called politically incorrect, the ideas people "call" politically incorrect most of all are not Elon's vague centrist stuff it's the extreme stuff. LLMs just track probable relations between tokens, not meaning, it having this result based on that prompt is obvious.
phillipcarter · 34m ago
We have no evidence to suggest that they just made a prompt change and it dialed up the 4chan weights. This repository is a graveyard where a CI bot occasionally makes a text diff, but we have no understanding if it's connected with anything deployed live or not.
pvg · 1h ago
The mishap is not the chatbot accidentally getting too extreme and at odds with 'Elon's centrist stuff'. The mishap is the chatbot is too obvious and inept about Musk's intent.
zemo · 1h ago
it's almost like Grok takes "politically incorrect" to be synonymous with racist.
gtsop · 2h ago
> it's not likely actual neo-nazi's, they are too dumb to manipulate an infobot.
No they are not. There exist brilliant people and monkeybrains across the whole population and thus the political spectrum. The ratios might be different, but I am pretty sure there exist some very smart neo-nazis
pxc · 51m ago
There are, but fascism's internal cultural fixtures are more aesthetic than intellectual. It doesn't really attract or foster intellectuals like some radical political movements do, and it shows very clearly in the composition of the "rank and file".
Put plainly, the average neo-Nazi is astonishingly, astonishingly stupid.
pavlov · 1h ago
Curtis Yarvin’s writing is insufferable and many of his ideas are both bad and effectively Nazism, but clearly he’s very smart (and very eager to prove it).
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lupusreal · 1h ago
I'm out of the loop, why is it an "infobot" and not a chatbot?
delecti · 1h ago
No, that's definitely not what happened. For quite a while Grok actually seemed to have a surprisingly left-leaning slant. Then recently Elon started pushing the South African "white genocide" conspiracy theory, and Grok was sloppily updated and started pushing that same conspiracy theory even in unrelated threads. Last week Elon announced another update to Grok, which coincided with this dramatic right-wing swing in Grok's responses. This change cannot be blamed on public interactions like Microsoft's Tay, it's very clearly the result of a deliberate update, whether or not these results were intentional.
rurp · 1h ago
That LLM is incredibly filtered, just in a different way from others. I suspect by "retraining" the model Elon actually means that they just updated the system prompt, which is exactly what they have done for other hacked in changes like preventing the bot from criticizing Trump/Elon during the election.
wat10000 · 2h ago
It sure didn’t seem to take much manipulation from what I saw. “Which 20th century figure would solve our current woes” is pretty mild input to produce “Hitler would solve everything!”
hackyhacky · 2h ago
> Not defending Elon or the infobot but my theory is that by leaving that LLM unfiltered people have learned how to gamify and manipulate it into having a fascist slant.
We don't need a theory that explains how Grok got a fascist slant, we know exactly what happened: Musk promise to remove the "woke" from Grok, and what's left is Nazi. [1]
> > we know exactly what happened
> The price of certainty is inaccuracy.
I think you're lost. You probably intended to post this on the "deep-sounding but meaningless aphorisms" page.
delusional · 1h ago
So the only way to be accurate is to vaguely gesture at hodgepodge theories and suggestions that people "do their own research"?
Surely you can be both accurate and certain, otherwise you should just shut up and be right all the time.
taco_emoji · 22m ago
lmaoooooooooooooooooooo
southernplaces7 · 1h ago
I assume he's reviving a new drive at internal consolidation and reviving the internal efficiency of X. This would be a good start considering this CEO's track record so far. She served a certain purpose and it's workable to replace her.
As for Musk's ownership of X itself, and his buying it: If I had been in his shoes, i'd have tried to squeeze for a lower price maybe, but the company was a worthwhile acquisition and the future is too long, with too many complex turns for anyone to clearly say whether his ownership of it is a business failure or a long-view piece of wisdom. What he controls now is still relevant, and if certain political/social winds change, could be more relevant still down the road. In either case, it could easily be a valuable political and business tool for Musk himself, for many years to come.
I simply don't see the destructiveness and failure that many people, here on this site and elsewhere have ranted about with Musk buying Twitter. Even with the firings and brand change, well, how necessary did those staffers end up being? Not much as it turns out. Better to have gotten rid of them during the initial chaos of a handover, when you can in any case expect problems from all corners, and then work on rebuilding with a fresh and company-aligned base that works to ensure stability down the road.
Being the richest man in the world, and one who has already assembled two consecutive historically noteworthy companies (Tesla and SpaceX), Musk is certainly not stupid even if his personality can be grotesque at times, some of the comments here claiming otherwise have no rational fucking clue what they're talking about. They speak from emotion, perhaps driven by ideological fixation, but not based on the visible evidence over multiple decades.
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.
Anyway she volunteered to be a puppet for a man who is clearly off the rails and her legacy will forever be stained.
Therefore the praise is weird, because she seemingly neither helped nor hurt the business.
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
Not only a laughable claim, but a harmful one. BLM led to a period of police non-aggression that raised Black homicide rates substantially, causing at least 10,000 additional Black victims. We're still in it right now so the body count is still increasing although we are finally coming out of that period of madness.
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Now, would he be upset about such efforts being derailed as a result, or is he even slightly bothered about his website now being packed to the tits with Nazis? Absolutely not. But I do think as unbelievably cringe as it would be if true, I really think he bought the damn thing because he just wanted to be the meme lord.
Mainly I just struggle with giving him as much credit as your theory does in terms of long term planning. He's an overgrown man-child.
Musk wanted to steer culture toward his own ends as the parent poster described and he wanted to be seen as some kind of.... cool vanguard of that, as you say.
It's really different facets of the same thing, right?
Damn near every mega-billionaire is, almost by definition. If the best thing you can come up with to do with money is make more of it at other people's expense, then you're not even close to what I'd call mentally mature.
That doesn't stop many oligarchs from making cunning plans with layers and layers of depth, or being excellent at misdirection and media manipulation - both of which Musk also has a long and well documented history of showing. It also doesn't stop them from hiring people to make and/or refine those plans. Shit, there's probably cunning bootlickers out there, like Yarvin, just pitching this shit to them all the time.
> I just struggle with giving him as much credit as your theory does in terms of long term planning
As far as plans go, "buy Twitter and destroy it because it threatens our class interests - but pretend you're doing it for free speech or whatever" isn't especially complicated. Just piss off advertisers, users, and your staff, in plausibly deniable ways. It's not like corporate media are going to call you on it.
Valuation also bounced back during her tenure.
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.
Like if she became my CEO, I'd really worry about my company/job.
Being 62 is the perfect age for such roles. Young enough to climb a flight of stairs; old enough to nod appropriately to her new peers' references from the 1980s. Executive search firms will be eager to guide her into as many board roles as she might want.
You're acting like Elon is uniquely stupid.
My point of gratitude for today is that my level of stupid is not nearly as consequential to others as some folks'.
(2) If she did have power, nothing good happened during her tenure, so what would she even be thanked for?
> *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.
What was there to thank her for?
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 understand she did convince a lot of advertisers to come back and provided a veneer of credibility.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/mar/19/value-elo...
- 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?
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
"Ms. Yaccarino had discussed her plans to leave with X employees earlier this week, before the incident with Grok"
Life got short for quite a few historical Nazis.
> > Arguably a competent person wouldn't have persisted in a role where it was obvious they were not able to make a meaningful difference.
> You'd be insane to leave a job with such few responsibilities and such insane compensation. Set for life.
Pay special attention to the phrasing "a role". We are not talking about specifically this role.
Again: you would not be insane to do so if staying in the job has substantial non-compensation consequences. Like jail.
I know Twitter had many terrible aspects, but I do miss the world voice old Twitter provided for quotes that could be engaged with in an "everyone is here" kind of feeling that doesn't exist on any other platforms right now.
For example, when the actual owner of the at Bitcoin handle wasn't pushing the narrative that Jack Dorsey wanted they hijacked the moniker and gave it to a pro b Blockstream (THE COMPANY THAT CONTROLS THE BITCOIN CODE BASE) individual. For most people that support Bitcoin and blockstream it looks like a victory of free speech but in reality they're just controlling more and more of the speech and kicking out anyone from the conversation who disagrees.
It skews one way, but there's definitely a large diversity in opinions on Reddit that are not hard to find. It's also transitioning into an India social media site, just from sheer population numbers.
I commented on a particular sub (in opposition to what i think the core hivemind is there) and was immediately banned from about 30 others.
Reddit is the most insular, single minded set of communities I've seen on social media. I dont think you can claim diversity if the userbase all wall themselves off from each other with bots.
"why do westerners hate indians, what did we do to them"
with
"maybe precieved as online scammers and also mass immigration into high paying jobs"
Edit: and to pay back (?), https://archive.is/Cn2hA
The sad part is that ad networks know more about our connections across platforms than we're allowed to.
The only issue is that Musk vastly overpaid for Twitter, but if he plans to keep it and use it for his political ambitions, that might not matter. Also remember that while many agree that $44B was a bit much, most did still put Twitter at 10s of billions, not the $500M I think you could justify.
The firings, which was going to tank Twitter also turned out reasonably well. Turns out they didn't need all those people.
Not to mention that now Grok is just openly white supremacist, calling itself MechaHitler and is flat out accusing Jewish people of wanting to kill white babies (https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/elon-musk-grok-antisem...)
You can judge for yourself whether bluesky is a competitive threat.
I misremembered an article from yesterday. It's threads that's catching up w twitter.
And I guess if you consider "the place with the MechaHitler AI" as good branding there's no arguing with you that it's doing just as well as Twitter.
The media seems to get a good laugh out if Grok arguing the plight of white South Africans and is fondness to Hitler, but I'm not seeing journalists and politicians leaving X in droves because of it.
Remember Tay Tweets?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(chatbot)
Honestly I really don't think a bad release of an LLM that was rolled back is really the condemnation you think it is.
And Tay was a non-LLM released a full 6 years before ChatGPT; you might as well bring up ELIZA.
Funny how ChatGPT is vanilla and grok somehow has a new racist thing to say every other week.
Those waiting for X to collapse are going to wait a lot longer than the original 6 months that it was predicted to collapse after the November 2022 takeover.
This might be like Stacey King, a Chicago Bulls player, jokingly claiming he and Michael Jordan "combined to score 70 points" on a night when Jordan scored 69 points
Haha...ok. I gave a bunch of stock from one of my companies to another one of my companies and made up a value during the transaction.
But he didn't? She wasn't even in the loop for many of the consequential decisions
Or maybe his "Howard Hughes in Hiding" era. Remains to be seen which route he takes. Could also be "Rasputen shot in the ** era" if hes not careful.
Clearly Musk has put his hand on the scale in multiple ways.
That's a bingo. Musk invited X users to Microsoft-Tay[1] Grok by sharing "divisive facts" with Grok.
1. In 2016, Microsoft decided to let its Tay chatbot interact, and learn from Twitter users and was soon praising Hitler. They did it twice, before shutting it down permanently. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(chatbot)
In fact, there was an interesting paper showed that fine tuning an LLM to produce malicious code (ie: with just malicious code examples in response to questions, no other prompts), causes it to produce more "evil" results in completely unrelated tasks. So it's going to be hard for Musk to cherry pick particular "evil" responses in fine tuning without slanting everything it does in that direction.
(Sorry she ever boarded?)
I mean she’s not wrong!
So she’s not actually leaving the platform, just the company.
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https://edition.cnn.com/2025/07/09/tech/linda-yaccarino-step...
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx2gy3j9xq6o
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jul/09/x-ceo-ste...
etc
enjoy the retirement!
[1] https://apnews.com/article/x-ceo-linda-yaccarino-elon-musk-g...
Musk has always been pretty transparent that that was his ambition for X.
A politically correct answer is one that keeps the currently politically powerful people happy, right? Musk/Trump defined politically correct for a couple months. I guess Musk might be politically incorrect now. Are they friends or enemies today?
It is surprising to find someone that doesn't know that, but would be less surprising if you don't live in the US.
> "Politically correct" in the US context means essentially the same thing as "woke"
I think it is (hopefully?) obvious from my comment that I actually do understand what it means in the US context, I was describing the odd situation WRT the US meaning and the origin of the phrase
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_correctness
> The term political correctness first appeared in Marxist–Leninist vocabulary following the Russian Revolution of 1917. At that time, it was used to describe strict adherence to the policies and principles of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, that is, the party line.
The politically correct opinions were the ones that agreed with those in power.
Every use I've ever heard from a US speaker (certainly over 100 uses over the decades) is a reference to progressive beliefs and sensibilities regardless of whether the progressives are in power or not.
That's not really fair to Yaccarino - Musk said this and she had to repeat it because she was (nominally) CEO.
They added a vector index a year and a half ago for a "see related tweets" feature - https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1720314092269822242 - though as far as I can tell that feature doesn't exist any more, presumably replaced by the ask Grok button.
The problem is ranking and relevance
I understand your point, but I think this sort of discourse leads people down the wrong path. G. Hotz is a pretty smart engineer. What he lacks at twitter is probably not engineering ability, but organization ability. The problem is likely not that the individual engineers aren't smart, it's that they end up working together to make each other worse than they could be.
If search could have been solved by a single smart person, it would have been done long ago. In the Bay Area, finding a world class researcher (in distributed systems, databases, text search or whatnot) able to do a short stint at a company to tackle a hard problem isn't particularly hard.
With the A's, you could at least be close by going to the city in their name.
how fascinating that the NY Times didn't find any room to mention in the article that despite this:
> She did not provide a reason for her departure.
it might possibly be related to the Elon's custom-tuned Grok LLM spent the last twenty four hours becoming even more Nazi-y?
seems fairly relevant especially given she didn't give any actual reason.
> Ms. Yaccarino had discussed her plans to leave with X employees earlier this week, before the incident with Grok, two people familiar with the matter said. xAI is largely separate from X, but Grok’s responses are often widely cited — and criticized — across the platform.
Not everything is about the current news cycle.
Outcomes suggests she failed at that.
Hopefully the next chief will be better.
Yaccarino doesn't strike me as the type.
It has gone from "crossing the line for most ordinary decent people" to "crossing the line for anyone who doesn't literally jerk off nightly to Mein Kampf", which _is_ a substantive change.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jul/09/grok-ai-p...
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HN is censoring news about X / Twitter https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44511132
Elon Musk's Grok praises Hitler, shares antisemitic tropes in new posts
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44504709
Musk's AI firm deletes posts after chatbot praises Hitler
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44507419
People who don't understand llms think saying don't shy away from making claims that are politically incorrect means it won't PC. In reality saying that just makes things associated with politically incorrect more likely. The /pol/ board is called politically incorrect, the ideas people "call" politically incorrect most of all are not Elon's vague centrist stuff it's the extreme stuff. LLMs just track probable relations between tokens, not meaning, it having this result based on that prompt is obvious.
No they are not. There exist brilliant people and monkeybrains across the whole population and thus the political spectrum. The ratios might be different, but I am pretty sure there exist some very smart neo-nazis
Put plainly, the average neo-Nazi is astonishingly, astonishingly stupid.
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We don't need a theory that explains how Grok got a fascist slant, we know exactly what happened: Musk promise to remove the "woke" from Grok, and what's left is Nazi. [1]
[1] https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2025/07/08/tech/grok-ai-antisemitism
The price of certainty is inaccuracy.
I think you're lost. You probably intended to post this on the "deep-sounding but meaningless aphorisms" page.
Surely you can be both accurate and certain, otherwise you should just shut up and be right all the time.
As for Musk's ownership of X itself, and his buying it: If I had been in his shoes, i'd have tried to squeeze for a lower price maybe, but the company was a worthwhile acquisition and the future is too long, with too many complex turns for anyone to clearly say whether his ownership of it is a business failure or a long-view piece of wisdom. What he controls now is still relevant, and if certain political/social winds change, could be more relevant still down the road. In either case, it could easily be a valuable political and business tool for Musk himself, for many years to come.
I simply don't see the destructiveness and failure that many people, here on this site and elsewhere have ranted about with Musk buying Twitter. Even with the firings and brand change, well, how necessary did those staffers end up being? Not much as it turns out. Better to have gotten rid of them during the initial chaos of a handover, when you can in any case expect problems from all corners, and then work on rebuilding with a fresh and company-aligned base that works to ensure stability down the road.
Being the richest man in the world, and one who has already assembled two consecutive historically noteworthy companies (Tesla and SpaceX), Musk is certainly not stupid even if his personality can be grotesque at times, some of the comments here claiming otherwise have no rational fucking clue what they're talking about. They speak from emotion, perhaps driven by ideological fixation, but not based on the visible evidence over multiple decades.