[HN Gopher] Linda Yaccarino is leaving X
___________________________________________________________________
Linda Yaccarino is leaving X
Author : donohoe
Score : 331 points
Date : 2025-07-09 14:52 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nytimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nytimes.com)
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| https://archive.today/9zvHZ
| throwaway150 wrote:
| The announcement on X:
| https://x.com/lindayax/status/1942957094811951197
| layer8 wrote:
| > As always, I'll see you on X
|
| So she's not actually leaving the platform, just the company.
| DealFl0w wrote:
| "Chief [Executive Officer]" isn't a role on the platform,
| it's a role with the company.
| namenotrequired wrote:
| The title does literally say she is leaving the platform
| DealFl0w wrote:
| Here on Hacker News, we should be good internet citizens
| and do more than just read the title.
| jdiff wrote:
| We can also be human together and find enjoyment in
| shared, incorrect first impressions.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Yes, I thought it meant she was deleting her Twitter account
| while remaining CEO!
| namenotrequired wrote:
| > the historic business turn around we have accomplished
| together has been nothing short of remarkable.
|
| I mean she's not wrong!
| CyberMacGyver wrote:
| 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.
| andsoitis wrote:
| You're saying two things:
|
| - 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?
| Xiol32 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Another possibility is that she was fired.
| mdasen wrote:
| 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.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| The speed at which replies mentioning Groks Nazi freakout
| get downvoted here make me really question where things
| are headed..
| selectodude wrote:
| 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".
| bikezen wrote:
| 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"
| snickerdoodle12 wrote:
| You'd be insane to leave a job with such few
| responsibilities and such insane compensation. Set for
| life.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Sure, and I agree, but that's not really related to what
| GP is saying
| ceejayoz wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| toomanyrichies wrote:
| Some might argue there are more important things in life
| than compensation.
|
| Self-respect, for example.
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| sorcerer-mar wrote:
| 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.
| josefresco wrote:
| 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.
| mandmandam wrote:
| > 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).
|
| 0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36685384
| steveBK123 wrote:
| Pretty good theory
| harikb wrote:
| 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...
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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?
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| I guess what I struggle with is seeing Musk taking that
| kind of top-down strategic view of things? Which that
| could entirely be a me problem. I think there's an
| inherent bias in the way a lot of people think where they
| assign these Machiavellian motives especially to the
| super-privileged and those in positions of power, the 5D
| chess type shit, and I tend to bias in the other
| direction where... a lot of times these guys are just
| fucking losers and they don't think terribly dissimilarly
| from your weird uncle who doesn't come to the reuinions
| anymore.
|
| Ultimately though, this is a bit of a weird aside to go
| on I fully admit. The "solutions" so to speak for people
| like this are basically the same whether they are dark-
| room schemers or dickheads with far too much money and
| not nearly enough accountability.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| Yeah, I don't think it was 5D chess at all.
|
| I think he saw a good (to him) opportunity to steer
| public discourse by tossing a big stack of cash at
| probably the most influential social media network in
| terms of mindshare, to push whatever ideas were careening
| through his mind at any given point.
|
| He may not have even been sober, much less playing 5D
| chess.
| mandmandam wrote:
| > 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.
| talentedcoin wrote:
| This is what I was talking about before, fwiw. Your
| beliefs are predicatable:
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-42444-z
|
| Our findings revealed a moderate positive association
| between psychedelic use and beliefs in alternative facts,
| as well as the specific belief that facts are politically
| influenced.
| mandmandam wrote:
| Cannabis with high CBD and minimal THC isn't a
| psychedelic, fyi.
|
| Amazing you didn't get that point even after it was made
| explicitly clear three times, but you still remember my
| username 10 days later.
|
| Also, asserting that someone who expresses class
| awareness and media literacy is dabbling in "alternative
| facts" and must be on some kind of psychedelic drugs is
| wildly uncalled for. This is the second time you've cast
| such aspersions on me for some reason - stop.
| greedo wrote:
| If you don't believe that what we accepts as facts are
| politically influenced, I have a bridge to sell you...
| talentedcoin wrote:
| What I don't believe is that somebody bought Twitter
| only, or even primarily, to further their "class
| interests". The whole framing here is bent.
| mandmandam wrote:
| > somebody
|
| That he's the wealthiest known man in the world seems
| like relevant context here.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Also that he tried to back out and a judge forced him to
| buy it.
| greedo wrote:
| No one, not even the cringiest, wanna-be edge lord from
| 4chan spends $44B to buy Twitter unless they think
| there's value there. Even paying a big premium for
| Twitter. So what value does Musk see in Twitter? He's not
| going to make money off it. He bought a huge megaphone to
| push his social/class interests.
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| It's pretty depressing such derangement infiltrated HN.
| Psychedelics are really a fine line. Looking at SF as an
| outsider - it either mints billionaires or completely
| destroys people.
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| Sorry, what money did billionaires took from you?
| woah wrote:
| 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.
| cschep wrote:
| I'd love to hear why this is being downvoted? Not
| agreeing is one thing, but it seems like a reasonable
| thing to suggest?
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Because Musk has provided abundant evidence of his
| political orientation over the last several years.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| He's provided evidence of being an impulsive fool for
| even longer. I defended Musk as a useful idiot for a
| while until be fully showed his true colors, but it has
| always been clear he's not a wise man.
|
| (His vigorous and pathetic efforts to get out of the
| purchase also push against it being a big master plan,
| FWIW.)
| greedo wrote:
| Witness his entire Boring Company being a sock puppet
| project to derail California's High Speed Rail system.
| larkost wrote:
| Can you provide more about this idea? I see the Boring
| company as being pretty feckless, and at the same time
| extremely boastful. They have gotten hopes up in a number
| of places about solving city traffic problems, only to go
| dark when the rubber (should have) met the road.
|
| But I don't see any of those having impacted the
| California High Speed Rail. Rather that has been harmed
| by lots of different groups throwing roadblocks up,
| sometime for ideological reasons (lots of this from State
| and National Republicans, sometimes with reasons, but
| often more political), and a whole lot of NIMBY (see:
| Palo Alto). What do you see the Boring Company having to
| do with that?
|
| As a side note: there are some really poorly thought
| through parts of the project, for example they don't have
| a plan for actually making it over the mountains into Los
| Angeles. I still want it to happen, but...
| stephen_g wrote:
| It was the silly and obviously unworkable Hyperloop idea
| that was pushed as an attempt to stop CAHSR, according to
| Musk's biographer [1].
|
| 1. https://www.disconnect.blog/p/the-hyperloop-was-
| always-a-sca...
| greedo wrote:
| Hyperloop was a stunt Musk spun up to mess with the HSR,
| and the Boring company to fight against subway type
| systems. I mixed the two up.
| freejazz wrote:
| > perfectly executed by omniscient villains with 20/20
| hindsight
|
| Is a strawman, to which the conclusion is also defied by
| the plain evidence of everything Musk has done on Twitter
| spankalee wrote:
| > It's conspiratorial thinking to assume that everything
| that happens in the world is perfectly executed by
| omniscient villains with 20/20 hindsight.
|
| Because the original comment isn't doing this. It's not
| talking about everything, it's talking about one specific
| thing in a very plausible scenario.
|
| It wouldn't even need to be a very complicated or
| widespread "conspiracy": Just Musk and a few VC guys in a
| Signal or Telegram thread saying
|
| > someone should just buy Twitter and downrank all these
| crazy leftists
|
| > Hmm
|
| > I'll help line up financing.
|
| > Ok!
|
| This isn't flat earth, chem trails, lizard people, or
| weather weapons. It's not even Illuminati, Masons, or
| Skull and Bones. We've seen some of these chats already.
| schmidtleonard wrote:
| You are missing the forest for one very odd tree. Yes,
| the tree is wacky, but
|
| * Every private media company has beneficial owners *
| Those beneficial owners are rich * Rich people who own
| things for a living have incentives opposed to those of
| most people, who work for a living
|
| These are not conspiracies, they are just basic facts of
| capitalism.
| psunavy03 wrote:
| Better to put "facts" in quotation marks considering that
| is clearly a statement of opinion, and a fairly
| caricatured one at that.
| quantified wrote:
| I haven't downvoted you, I am curious. Why do you
| disagree? In what relevant ways are their interests
| aligned?
| quantified wrote:
| You are conveniently omitting his reason to buy it.
| Personal megaphone and shortly thereafter LLM training
| data are the simplest reasons.
| contrast wrote:
| I think the GP is suggesting a simple explanation of why
| it went badly, since that is the subject of the thread,
| rather than an explanation of why Musk bought Twitter. No
| need for conspiratorial accusations of conveniently
| omitting anything.
| woah wrote:
| Maybe he just spent a lot of time shitposting on there.
| scns wrote:
| > formerly-brilliant
|
| When?
| breppp wrote:
| My conspiracy theory was that because of Musk's
| involvement in OpenAI he had foreknowledge of the
| impeding release of ChatGPT. In that context, Twitter as
| a source for AI training can be far more valuable than a
| rage filled social network. However he still failed
| horribly to time the market
| debugnik wrote:
| > Twitter as a source for AI training can be far more
| valuable than a rage filled social network
|
| Isn't Twitter the go-to example of a rage filled social
| network?
| jjfoooo4 wrote:
| I think Elon truly believed in the subscription model,
| which would free him from advertiser content influence.
| That and being terminally addicted to the platform
| himself, and being an impulsive gambler. I really don't
| think we've gotten where we are due to any (successful)
| master plan
| yibg wrote:
| Thing is, she failed at being the fall person. It's clear
| to everyone who was calling the shots, so ironically she
| was ineffective as the fall person.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Nothing positive can come out of Twitter for McLuhanite
| reasons.
|
| Zohran Mamdami's greatest attribute in media is that if
| you see him in video you _see him listening_ to people.
| Even people who aren 't inclined to agree with him talk
| to him and say "he was so nice, he listened to me."
| High-D [1] billionaires who support High-D candidates
| such as Clinton, Cuomo and Adams are driven crazy by
| this. [2]
|
| Even though Twitter _does_ provide a back channel and a
| Twitter user may really be a nice guy who listens and
| replies, the structure of the thing is such that you don
| 't _see_ that user listening and in fact the user
| interface on Twitter makes it really hard to see that
| conversation for outsides in the way that the heavy
| Twitter user doesn 't get. Not least because the heavy
| Twitter user might not realize that people who aren't
| logged in don't see anything at all (pro tip: just don't
| post links to Twitter on HN, _you_ might see a great
| discussion with a lot of context, the rest of us just see
| a single sentence floating in space without any context)
|
| On video though, the person who listens listens visibly,
| you see the microexpressions in real time as they react
| to what the other person is saying. It's a thing of
| beauty. (Coalition leaders such as Chuck Schumer and
| Nancy Peloci do a lot of listening as part of their job
| but constituents only see them talking!)
|
| The above is a second order concern compared to the
| general compression of discourse in Twitter which is
| talked about in [2]. Twitter addicts spend 4-5 hours a
| day traversing graphs to follow discussions and
| understand (or think they understand?) context, the rest
| of us just see "white farmers" which means one thing if
| you're racist, another if you're "anti-racist", and just
| means "move along folks, nothing more to see here" for
| the great silent majority. When Twitter is at equilibrium
| every movement creates and equal and opposite amount of
| backlash, nothing actually changes except polarization
| increases, there is more and more talking and less and
| less listening, and the possibility of real social change
| diminishes.
|
| Burn it down.
|
| [1] https://darkfactor.org/
|
| [2] for once good NYT content that isn't paywalled:
| https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/28/opinion/ezra-klein-
| show-c...
| madeofpalk wrote:
| One would imagine that a CEO lacking power is the precise
| reason a company would perform poorly.
| falcor84 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I'd imagine the paycheck helped resolve the quandary.
| nradov wrote:
| I mean I've been in a few jobs where I had to "manage" my
| boss in order to accomplish anything.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| were those jobs fun? Certainly havent been for me
| majewsky wrote:
| To a certain extent, you always have to manage your boss,
| whether as an individual contributor or as a subordinate
| manager. A boss managing multiple people does not have
| the same mental bandwidth as all the people in their team
| combined, so the employees cannot bring every matter to
| the boss's attention. Choosing which matters to bring
| (and how to present them) is precisely what managing
| upwards means.
|
| (In fact, if you're being praised
|
| When someone says that they need to manage their boss,
| what they usually mean is that the boss reacts poorly or
| unproductively to bad news, or that they like to
| interfere in parts of the work process that would best be
| left to the employees, and so this normal part of
| everyone's job turns into a constant walk on eggshells.
| xdavidliu wrote:
| I wonder how this setup compares with Mira Murati and
| Greg Brockman.
| teyc wrote:
| On Acquired podcast, Ballmer spoke of his experience as
| CEO with Gates as CTO. It was hell.
| lenkite wrote:
| > Valuation did drop during her tenure
|
| Valuation also bounced back during her tenure.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| She shut her mouth and didn't cause trouble.
| thayne wrote:
| I don't think she is entirely to blame, but I think there
| is some blame for not standing up to Musk and leading
| better.
| dctoedt wrote:
| > _I think there is some blame for not standing up to
| Musk and leading better._
|
| That seems in the same category as saying there's some
| blame on her for not working harder on basketball in her
| youth and so never becoming a WNBA Finals MVP. (Narrator:
| Um, no, she's not nearly tall enough ....)
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| I'm just not sure her complete lack of power to stand up
| to Musk is a defense. If a controversial rich guy offers
| you a CEO job that consists entirely of laundering his
| reputation by pretending his decisions are your own, you
| have a social responsibility not to take it. I'd be more
| sympathetic if she were some random person who couldn't
| otherwise dream of an executive level pay package, but
| she was the head of ads at NBC.
| greedo wrote:
| "We have established what you are, madam. We are now
| merely haggling over the price."
| michaelt wrote:
| _> If a controversial rich guy offers you a CEO job that
| consists entirely of laundering his reputation by
| pretending his decisions are your own, you have a social
| responsibility not to take it._
|
| I don't think you become the CEO of any major company by
| believing that "social responsibility" exists. Doesn't
| the job pretty much select for the type of person who
| thinks the world owes them $20+ million a year?
|
| With that said - it's dumb to blame the puppet for the
| acts of the ventriloquist.
| XorNot wrote:
| "just following orders" has been well established as no
| defense, and is more relevant than usual.
| Aeolun wrote:
| I mean, you are hired as a CEO by _Elon Musk_ , there
| must be some certain expectations on the capabilities of
| a CEO, and I think one of the first one is being able to
| stand up for yourself, if nothing else.
| xnx wrote:
| > her legacy will forever be stained
|
| Where can I sell my legacy for $6 million/year?
| belter wrote:
| I will do it for half that price....
| geodel wrote:
| Don't wait. Pick up your phone and Call Elon right now as
| this position is filling up fast.
| abirch wrote:
| My question is where does she go from here?
|
| Like if she became my CEO, I'd really worry about my
| company/job.
| rtkwe wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| She's 62 years old. She can just retire.
| snickerdoodle12 wrote:
| Invest the 6mil and enjoy a carefree life?
| delusional wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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'.
| antonvs wrote:
| > My point of gratitude for today is that my level of
| stupid is not nearly as consequential to others as some
| folks'.
|
| Ooh, a new life goal that I've already achieved, thanks!
| freejazz wrote:
| You think he's just normal stupid? It's a minimum
| especially stupid
| GCA10 wrote:
| 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.
| vintermann wrote:
| Politics! Or maybe management consultants. Lots of
| consulting jobs are really just about taking the blame.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| And politics are about asigning the blame to someone
| else. :D
| frereubu wrote:
| Failure can teach you a lot if you're willing to learn.
| tempodox wrote:
| But did she actally fail?
| dyauspitr wrote:
| With the tens of millions she made does she even need to
| go anywhere?
| danans wrote:
| > 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.
| bottlerock wrote:
| Sounds like a snooze.. But maybe someone will pay to not
| take chances.
| devnullbrain wrote:
| Meta
| mcphage wrote:
| (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 wrote:
| I'm not suggesting she should be thanked. I'm suggesting
| that the failures listed are hard to ascribe to her
| ineptitude.
| anonymars wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Nothing! That's why I didn't comment on that. I commented
| on "remarkably inept."
| anonymars wrote:
| Gotcha. I guess another episode of "both participants
| think the other is crazy"
|
| My read wasn't that the "inept" was specifically her, but
| rather the leadership of the company at the time in
| general (for which, regardless, she is being thanked on
| Twitter). In other words, either
|
| (1) she was a figurehead that didn't do anything and
| thanking her is stupid
|
| (2) she _wasn 't_ a figurehead and actually was in
| charge, in which case thanking her is still stupid
| because such leadership was inept (suing their
| advertisers, etc.)
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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?
| olalonde wrote:
| You may not like Elon Musk but he's doing remarkably well for
| someone who is "clearly off the rails".
| feoren wrote:
| Yes, corruption pays. Although if "doing remarkably well"
| means being addicted to ketamine, having many exes and
| children who refuse to speak with you, tanking multiple
| businesses to the point that your products get sabotaged
| just for being associated with you, getting booed off
| stages, licking the boots of fascists in the hope they'll
| let you call them "daddy", paying people to play online
| games for you to impress nerds (unsuccessfully, instead
| getting online-bullied for it), etc., etc., then I think
| I'd rather not "do remarkably well", thank you very much.
|
| Elon does not seem like a happy man. Is money the only
| points humans score themselves by? It's like watching
| someone bragging about getting the highest ever score at a
| game that they hate.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| > licking the boots of fascists in the hope they'll let
| you call them "daddy"
|
| Which fascists?
| therouwboat wrote:
| German far-right party AfD?
| blockmarker wrote:
| You are calling fascist and far right the political party
| led by a lesbian woman, married to a Sri Lankan
| immigrant, with an adopted daughter. "Fascist" is a word
| without meaning.
| lawlessone wrote:
| They are fascist.
| therouwboat wrote:
| What does sexual orientation or adopted daughter have to
| do it?
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Do you mean that in the sense that he is licking the
| boots of so many fascists at once, including Trump, Xi
| Jinping, Putin, and any other fascist boot he can find,
| while calling them all daddy, that you're confused which
| of those many fascists feoren is referring to?
| olalonde wrote:
| You have a distorted view or reality. Elon seems pretty
| happy to me and is undeniably successful in business -
| arguably the most successful entrepreneur of our time. I
| don't know much about his personal life but I suspect
| that him having babies with multiple women is due to
| personal choices rather than a sign of misfortune. He
| certainly doesn't seem "off the rails" to me. That said,
| I can understand that his lifestyle is not for everyone.
| lawlessone wrote:
| The man literally got punched out of the whitehouse for
| substance abuse lol
|
| His children break contact with him moment they become
| adults. If it wasn't for the money he would have been
| forbidden to see them long ago.
|
| Everyone hates him on the left and the right.
|
| If you consider a rich 50 year old creep doing drugs and
| going around impregnating young women and paying them to
| go away as successful? Then yes he is ..
| thomassmith65 wrote:
| Elon Musk is doing well now the same way Elvis Presley or
| Howard Hughs were doing well in their final years.
| freejazz wrote:
| Like, financially? Sure. I don't think that was ever in
| dispute.
| olalonde wrote:
| In what sense is he "off the rails" then?
| thomassmith65 wrote:
| My eleventh wife just gave birth to my 58th child. Musk
| seems perfectly normal to me /s
| scyzoryk_xyz wrote:
| She was hired to perform stunt, a nose-dive with the company.
|
| Folks hired for something like that aren't in it for
| "legacy".
| oooyay wrote:
| There's a market for CEOs that are "puppets" or managed by
| another CEO. In that way I doubt her reputation is
| necessarily stained as anyone making that much money lives in
| a different world and under different terms than (presumably)
| you and I do.
| sorcerer-mar wrote:
| Oh sure, I have no doubt she can get another cushy job if
| she wants it. I just mean that she has revealed herself as
| a coward at best, and a deplorable snake at worst.
| Onavo wrote:
| No, she's just helping to sculpt the glass cliff.
| librasteve wrote:
| well, yes. but she now has a much enriched resume
| sdegutis wrote:
| > her legacy will forever be stained
|
| I would like to believe that people can change over time.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| She had one job, and that was to get Musk to keep his fucking
| mouth shut, at which she failed spectacularly.
| Imnimo wrote:
| The way I see it, her job had two parts - reign in Elon, and
| then run the show. But she couldn't (or wasn't interested in)
| doing the first part, and so her tenure was a failure. Gwynne
| Shotwell at SpaceX does a great job at both, by contrast.
| npc_anon wrote:
| What legacy?
|
| She's not a well known public figure. She ran the ad
| department at NBC. Is now very rich and at age 61, close
| enough to retirement age.
| recursive wrote:
| If you have enough money, any age can be retirement age.
| The whole concept of "retirement" is really for the working
| class anyway.
| sorcerer-mar wrote:
| Do you not think someone who ran the ad department at NBC
| has a reputation?
|
| "Legacy" doesn't mean "guy-on-the-street's perception of
| you."
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > 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?
|
| Why is that weird? Say you have a company operating normally.
| The CEO dies and isn't replaced. Do you think it's weird for
| the company's value to drop?
| misiti3780 wrote:
| it didnt drop 80%:
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/mar/19/value-elo...
| lostlogin wrote:
| Even if the valuation is the same (seems unlikely), a fairly
| small rate of inflation on that sum of money is likely to be
| a number that matters.
| mrtksn wrote:
| 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.
| joot82 wrote:
| She was mainly brought on to fix relationships with
| advertisers, they were just pulling out that time because of
| rampant nazi and hate speech (by users) on the platform,
| after they fired the content moderation teams. I think she
| did what she could over the last 2 years and some of the ad
| revenue came back, but after the latest MechaHitler escapades
| I guess she got some texts from people...
| gitremote wrote:
| "The glass cliff is a hypothesized phenomenon in which women
| are more likely to break the "glass ceiling" (i.e. achieve
| leadership roles in business and government) during periods
| of crisis or downturn when the risk of failure is highest."
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_cliff
| mrguyorama wrote:
| You might have a point if he didn't ignore every other one of
| those polls he ran.
| bhouston wrote:
| > 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.
| tinco wrote:
| Given the circumstances, is an 80% drop that bad? Many people
| were expecting Twitter to simply go bankrupt. Perhaps she's
| the one that saved Twitter.
| Invictus0 wrote:
| She got her bag and got out. Seems perfectly rational to me.
| odo1242 wrote:
| Genuinely, I wasn't even aware that Musk had actually done the
| initially promised thing of appointing a different CEO.
| zzzeek wrote:
| if she had no power to make decisions then how would the
| company's decline in valuation be her fault?
| reactordev wrote:
| Top executives fail upwards. She did exactly what she set out
| to do.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| Hiring her would be a favour to Elon. She likely knew this
| when she took the job.
| cm2012 wrote:
| Twitter valuation dropped for two primary reasons:
|
| 1) Most tech valuations dropped about 50%-80% in between Elon's
| offer and Reddit formally accepting it. This was the end of the
| 2021 tech boom.
|
| 2) Elon being a moron and turning off brand advertisers in any
| way he can when direct response ads don't really work on the
| platform.
| mandeepj wrote:
| > the valuation dropped 80% and they were suing advertisers for
| not advertising
|
| That already happened before she got onboard.
|
| > One time they let her speak publicly it turned out to be a
| disaster.
|
| One time? She has spoken publicly many times. Care to share
| more about what you are referring to? I have no recollection of
| such a thing being done by her.
|
| It's not easy to recover from your unpredictable boss shouting
| "FU" to your advertisers from a stage.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| So you are saying Elon musk is inept?
|
| We all know who wanted to sue advertisers, we aren't stupid.
| thih9 wrote:
| > One time they let her speak publicly it turned out to be a
| disaster.
|
| Context?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| I guess the Nazi chatbot was the last straw. Amazed she lasted
| this long, honestly.
| andsoitis wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| She was was never the chief, only the chief's main
| administrator.
| toomanyrichies wrote:
| "Assistant _to the_ regional manager ". [1]
|
| 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wA9kQuWkU7I
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| 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.
| quickthrowman wrote:
| Physical restraint is the only thing that would stop him and
| I imagine he rolls with security so...
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Her only true role was to fulfill Musk's silly promise to
| step down as CEO after a public vote.
| https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1604617643973124097
| baking wrote:
| She was CEO of X which was sold to xAI. I'm not sure she had
| any control over Grok.
| torlok wrote:
| You don't think Elon went behind her back constantly? You
| think the next CEO will have more to say? She pretended to be
| in charge, she got paid, good for her. What are you hoping
| for. X is a dump, and the sooner it goes away the better for
| everybody.
| miroljub wrote:
| What is the Nazi chatbot?
| nickthegreek wrote:
| grok yesterday.
| lode wrote:
| Grok, the xAI chatbot, went full neo-nazi yesterday:
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jul/09/grok-
| ai-p...
| perihelions wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44504709 ( _" Elon
| Musk's Grok praises Hitler, shares antisemitic tropes in new
| posts"_--16 hours ago; 89 comments)
| rtkwe wrote:
| "Weirdly" always gets flagged almost immediately even
| though it's quite tech relevant.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| Yes, sensing this trend at HN lately
| tslocum wrote:
| With 8 points in an hour, my post drawing attention to
| this is missing from the front pages.
|
| HN is censoring news about X / Twitter
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44511132
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20250709152608/https://news.y
| com...
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20250709172615/https://news.y
| com...
| rsynnott wrote:
| Naughty Ol' Mr Car's fanboys tend to flag anything that
| makes Dear Leader look bad. Surprised this one hasn't
| been nuked yet, tbh.
| theahura wrote:
| see here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44510635
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Related discussions from the past 12 hrs for those catching
| up:
|
| _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
| juujian wrote:
| I'm surprised the NYT article does not even mention it.
| Bender wrote:
| 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.
| gtsop wrote:
| > 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
| pavlov wrote:
| 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).
| FireBeyond wrote:
| Yarvin is an out-and-out white nationalist, though he
| denies it, or at least the name: "I am not a white
| nationalist, though I am not exactly allergic to the
| stuff" - whatever the hell that mealy-mouthed answer is
| meant to mean.
|
| He even wrote a bloviating article to further clarify
| that he is not a white nationalist. You'd be forgiven,
| though, if you didn't read the title. It spends most of
| the article sympathizing with, understanding, agreeing
| with, and talking of how white nationalism "resonates"
| with him. But don't worry, he swears he's not one at the
| end of the article!
| pxc wrote:
| 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.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > It doesn't really attract or foster intellectuals like
| some radical political movements do
|
| It definitely attracts people who are competent in
| technology and propaganda is sufficient numbers for the
| task being discussed, especially when as a mass movement
| it has (or is perceived to have) a position of power that
| advantage-seeking people want to exploit. If anything,
| the common perception that fascists are "astonishingly,
| astonishingly stupid" makes this _more_ attractive for
| people who are both competent and also amoral
| opportunists (which do occur together, competence and
| moral virtue aren 't particularly correlated.)
| wat10000 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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]
|
| [1] https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2025/07/08/tech/grok-ai-
| antisemitism
| philipallstar wrote:
| > we know exactly what happened
|
| The price of certainty is inaccuracy.
| delusional wrote:
| 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.
| rurp wrote:
| 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.
| delecti wrote:
| 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.
| coolKid721 wrote:
| It's just the prompt: https://github.com/xai-org/grok-
| prompts/commit/c5de4a14feb50...
|
| 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.
| zemo wrote:
| it's almost like Grok takes "politically incorrect" to be
| synonymous with racist.
| pvg wrote:
| 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.
| phillipcarter wrote:
| 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.
| lupusreal wrote:
| I'm out of the loop, why is it an "infobot" and not a
| chatbot?
| duxup wrote:
| Hasn't the bot done that thing before? And she stayed?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Not at this level, no.
| rsynnott wrote:
| 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.ap
| p/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 wrote:
| It turns out bluesky is useful after all, as an ad hoc
| archive of X. Xd
| jeffbee wrote:
| 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.
| UltraSane wrote:
| 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.
| lokar wrote:
| Basic term based retrieval has been solved for 30+ years
|
| The problem is ranking and relevance
| lokar wrote:
| 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).
| simonw wrote:
| 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.
| phillipcarter wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Good support for regex and boolean operators helps a lot
| with that. But that requires user skill.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| Then it's not a solved problem in any meaningful way.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| klank wrote:
| > Saying WeChat is a super app is like saying an app store
| is a super app.
|
| I don't think they care about the experience or
| functionality. I think it's just about being able to exert
| enough of a legal or structural claim to get their fingers
| on a cut of the eventual transactions enabled by the
| various "apps" in the "super app".
| fundad wrote:
| Yes most of their revenue growth is expected to be as the
| everything app (or a video platform?).
|
| Musk has said over and over he doesn't care about advertising
| revenue, he mangled a quote from the Princess Bride to say "I
| don't care" and then he said if advertisers try to blackmail
| him with money (even stranger phrasing) they could go f*ck
| themselves.
|
| [https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-misquotes-
| princess...]
| [https://www.forbes.com/sites/briansolis/2023/12/05/elon-
| musk...]
|
| I think gaining the influence to fire regulators
| investigating his companies was what he wanted.
|
| BTW he sold Twitter to another subsidiary of X Corp, I wonder
| if he paid back the debt from the LBO of Twitter.
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| 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.
| mumbisChungo wrote:
| Change a few words and this describes every social platform
| including this one. Your comment is evidence, and so is this
| one.
| tristan957 wrote:
| There are no followers on HN, unless I've totally missed
| something about the platform.
| bee_rider wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| "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 wrote:
| > 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
|
| 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.
| hollerith wrote:
| 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 -- almost
| certainly over 100 uses, going back to when Reagan was
| President or maybe a year or 2 after Reagan -- is a
| reference to progressive beliefs and sensibilities
| regardless of whether the progressives are in power or
| not.
|
| You are introducing your own definition of a phrase that
| everyone currently agrees on the meaning of. When this is
| done for no good reason, it is harmful because everyone
| relies on language to think together, so when the meaning
| of words get muddied unnecessarily, we get worse at
| thinking together.
|
| What, pray, is your reason?
| dylan604 wrote:
| There was a lot of radio word play. They couldn't say
| "that sucks" so they said "that vacuums" instead type of
| nonsense. Now, they just say "that sucks". But back
| around the Bush Sr and Clinton period, there were changes
| to broadcast rules that led to talk radio becoming what
| it has which also led to Fox News and then everyone else
| following suit
| hollerith wrote:
| Hi, sadly, I removed my description the first time I
| heard "politically correct" (on KUSF during the Reagan
| admin or maybe a year or 2 later) because I did not need
| it.
| hollerith wrote:
| "my description _of_ the first time I heard "
| bee_rider wrote:
| > I knew about the Soviet use, which is why I qualified
| with "in the US context".
|
| I assumed you knew the modern and the original use. I
| generally assume folks know the basic definitions of the
| terms they are using (until proven otherwise), because
| otherwise the conversation will get really tedious and
| pointless...
| meepmorp wrote:
| > 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.
| delusional wrote:
| > 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.
| hocuspocus wrote:
| 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.
| ndiddy wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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".
| leakycap wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| fkyoureadthedoc wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| afavour wrote:
| What, specifically, did you say that was "in opposition
| to the core hive mind" that led you to being blocked?
| swarnie wrote:
| Sorry, maybe i wasn't clear.
|
| I posted on the ReformUK subreddit in opposition to
| something that was being touted there. The context of the
| post doesn't matter, posting on that sub is enough to get
| you blanked banned from many other placed.
|
| Getting banned from a default sub you've never posted in
| because you told a racist boomer somewhere else they
| might be falling for propaganda is bloody weird.
| campbel wrote:
| I think the intention of it, as weird as it may seem, is
| to punish people for engaging with content the other
| subreddit mods feel is distasteful enough to warrant the
| effort.
|
| I can't speak to whether this is a useful tactic on their
| part, or whether its fair to you, but IMO this is just
| another kind of "free speech" that exists.
| fkyoureadthedoc wrote:
| There's a subreddit for everything. Reddit as a whole has
| plenty of users that represent any opinion you can
| imagine. Fairly conservative subreddits hit r/all
| regularly, but not as much as less conservative ones.
|
| I think what you're trying to say is that on default
| subs, or some popular ones, that you can't post/comment
| some things without it getting removed, and possibly
| banned from those subs. Which is absolutely true. Same
| thing is true on HN, you can't even make a post about
| Grok's latest escapades without getting flagged.
|
| But if you just want to have some space to discuss some
| topic, make subreddit for it, moderate it however you
| want. Reddit itself isn't going to ban you unless it's
| against site level guidelines.
|
| It's pretty hard to get a site level ban. One easy way is
| to use a VPN though. My account (and any new one I make,
| so probably my IP/device too) was banned for ban evasion
| because I accidentally left my VPN on when using the
| Reddit app.
| Hyperboreanal wrote:
| Your subreddit gets banned immediately if you don't agree
| with the redditeurs.
|
| You don't see this an as issue because you share their
| opinions
| peab wrote:
| reddit is like the most censored part of the internet at
| the moment.
| krunck wrote:
| All caps don't make it true.
| kragen wrote:
| Possibly leakycap is thinking about 02012 and you're thinking
| about 02018. In that case you'd both be right about Twitter.
| tonymet wrote:
| this was my take as well. twitter nostalgia not reality. I
| put the egalitarian age at around 2009 but you're right
| Kony-2012 was a huge pivot for social media
| kragen wrote:
| I was talking about reality. Twitter wasn't perfect in
| 02012 but it was before the reproductively viable worker
| ant.
| baby wrote:
| It's literally impossible to post anything on any interesting
| subreddit right now, your post will just repeatedly get
| deleted.
| tonymet wrote:
| Can you drill into "everyone is here"? Prior to twitterfiles,
| Twitter felt overly corporate .
|
| I agree it's pivoted into another community. A lot of the
| mainstream and left leaning contributors have been downranked
| or moved to other platforms.
|
| But Twitter hasn't felt like raw, egalitarian conversation
| since 2009
| righthand wrote:
| I think the "everyone is here" feeling is because the media
| outlets use it quite a bit. So even though mostly everyone is
| not on Twitter it felt like anyone who is anyone was on
| Twitter. I don't really miss the FOMO that was intended to
| produce but I imagine if you played along it validated the
| FOMO some how.
| martinald wrote:
| To be honest though it is still by far the best place to
| get "news" about (very recent) current affairs. Obviously
| there is an incredible amount of disinformation on it, but
| if you can filter that out mentally (though I don't know
| how possible that is), you tend to get a far more 'real
| time' take on things.
|
| Me and a friend were talking about this before - for big
| news stories I/we would instinctively put rolling news on.
| Now it's usually Twitter I check.
|
| This is compounded by the fact that so many political
| events 'happen' on Twitter/X (and for Trump, Truth Social
| then screenshotted onto Twitter). Even without Trump I
| would say the majority of UK political 'intrigue' is done
| directly on twitter.
|
| So I think it's actually the other way round; media outlets
| use it quite a bit because instead of press conferences and
| what not a lot of news comes straight onto it.
|
| Btw, this isn't too say traditional journalism doesn't have
| a place - it absolutely does and most of the current
| affairs content I read is on that. But for 'fast moving'
| events Twitter has managed to keep its place in my eyes,
| which I'm surprised about to be honest. Bluesky does not
| have anywhere near the same momentum which really shows you
| how important network effects are.
| timeon wrote:
| > (though I don't know how possible that is)
|
| Not possible if you are exposed to it periodically. So
| the value of 'news' source seems to be negative.
| ujkhsjkdhf234 wrote:
| 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.
| jimt1234 wrote:
| Sounds like being the manager for the Oakland... Sacramento...
| _Unknown location_ Athletics. Well, minus the tons of money and
| Nazi chat bots. LOL
| dylan604 wrote:
| 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.
| nickthegreek wrote:
| pretty sure she did alot of reputational damage to herself
| along the way.
| Invictus0 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| "I accepted a difficult position with the expectation
| that I would make a significant impact on the company's
| future. Now, looking back, I'm pleased with what I was
| able to accomplish. I look forward to more challenging
| engagements."
|
| At least, that's how I would spin it.
|
| But I'd probably have AI massage the text a bit ;-)
| toomanyrichies wrote:
| > But I'd probably have AI massage the text a bit ;-)
|
| Just not Grok specifically. Wouldn't want it "massaging
| the text" with ethnic jokes.
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| 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.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Shes 62 she can just retire and live on a beach for the
| next 30 or so years.
| toomanyrichies wrote:
| > Shes 62 she can just retire and live on a beach for the
| next 30 or so years.
|
| As Rust Kohle said in "True Detective": "People incapable
| of guilt usually do have a good time..."
| idop wrote:
| > to be the fall guy
|
| People keep saying that, but what did she take the fall for?
| Hoasi wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Which really says a lot about how hard it is to leave
| platforms. The network effect is hard to overcome.
| taurath wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| baby wrote:
| how do you move platform when you have >10k followers on
| twitter?
| rvz wrote:
| ..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 wrote:
| >..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 wrote:
| "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"
| nailer wrote:
| But Twitter/X owns that training data. Tesla (or whatever
| else you're trying to say is Stacey King) does not.
| CyberMacGyver wrote:
| 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
| matwood wrote:
| > ..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.
| moomin wrote:
| To misquote an adage: Elon Musk can stay irrational longer
| than I can stay solvent.
| mrweasel wrote:
| 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.
| threetonesun wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| amrocha wrote:
| 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.
| greenie_beans wrote:
| you must not know many journalists because they certainly
| left in droves
| archagon wrote:
| The job of journalists and politicians is to broadcast to
| as wide an audience as they can. It is not particularly
| surprising that many retain Twitter accounts for the
| marketing value.
| bikezen wrote:
| After NPR left twitter they saw a 1% drop in traffic from
| socials. It is not a useful platform.
|
| Source: https://niemanreports.org/npr-twitter-musk/
| kevinventullo wrote:
| I don't think we can say for sure whether it's doing
| worse businesswise since the numbers aren't public. But
| consider e.g. https://www.adweek.com/media/advertisers-
| returning-to-x/
|
| "From January to September 2024, marketing intelligence
| platform MediaRadar found that (X's former top
| advertisers including Comcast, IBM, Disney, Warner Bros.
| Discovery, and Lionsgate Entertainment) collectively
| spent less than $3.3 million on X. This is a 98% year-
| over-year drop from the $170 million spent during the
| same period in 2023."
| rockemsockem wrote:
| I will fondly remind folks that Grok isn't even the first
| LLM to become a Nazi on Twitter.
|
| 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.
| amrocha wrote:
| 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.
| timschmidt wrote:
| This ChatGPT? https://futurism.com/chatgpt-encouraged-
| murder-sam-altman
| amrocha wrote:
| Not to say there aren't problems with ChatGPT, but it
| generally steers clear of controversial subjects unless
| coaxed into it.
|
| Grok actively leans into racism and nazism.
| MetaWhirledPeas wrote:
| > Funny how ChatGPT is vanilla and grok somehow has a new
| racist thing to say every other week
|
| To be fair, 'exposing' ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini as
| racist will get you a lot fewer clicks.
|
| Musk claims Grok to be less filtered in general than
| other LLMs. This is what less filtered looks like. LLMs
| are not human; if you get one to say racist things it's
| probably because you were _trying_ to make it say racist
| things. If you want this so-called problem solved by
| putting bowling bumpers on the bot, by all means go use
| ChatGPT.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| >This is what less filtered looks like
|
| It's so "less filtered" that they had to _add a
| requirement in the system prompt to talk about white
| genocide_
|
| This idea that "less filtered" LLMs will be "naturally"
| very racist is something that a lot of racists really
| really want to be true because they want to believe their
| racist views are backed by data.
|
| They are not.
| MetaWhirledPeas wrote:
| I asked MS Copilot, "Did the Grok team add a requirement
| in the system prompt to talk about white genocide?"
|
| Answer: "I can't help with that."
|
| This is not helping your case.
|
| Gemini had a better response: "xAI later stated that this
| behavior was due to an 'unauthorized modification' by a
| 'rogue employee'."
| amrocha wrote:
| Avoiding sensitive subjects is not the same thing as
| endorsing racist views if that's what you're implying.
| amrocha wrote:
| Nobody's trying to get grok to talk about MechaHitler. At
| that point you just know Musk said that out loud in a
| meeting and someone had to add it to groks base prompt.
| rockemsockem wrote:
| It absolutely has not been claiming that it's
| "MechaHitler" since it was released.
|
| Try.
| amrocha wrote:
| Right, it's just been talking about white genocide and
| generating nazi images instead.
| rockemsockem wrote:
| What Nazi images?
|
| The white genocide thing I remember hearing about and
| looked really forced
| blargey wrote:
| 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 user account released a full 6
| years before ChatGPT; you might as well bring up random
| users' markov chains.
| rockemsockem wrote:
| I posted the Wikipedia page, do you really think I don't
| know how long ago Tay was? I don't think the capabilities
| matter if we're just talking about chat bots being racist
| online.
|
| Also IDK what you mean by third+ flavor? I'm not familiar
| with other bad Grok releases, but I don't really use it,
| I just see it's responses on Twitter. Also do you not
| remember the Google image model that made the founding
| fathers different races by default?
| moomin wrote:
| I think it's hard to conclude that the people weren't needed
| given how spectacularly it tanked.
| mrweasel wrote:
| Has it tanked? X is still running, it still has millions of
| users.
| reverendsteveii wrote:
| 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.
|
| 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...)
| bpodgursky wrote:
| https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats
|
| You can judge for yourself whether bluesky is a
| competitive threat.
| mh- wrote:
| 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.
| reverendsteveii wrote:
| https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/07/threads-is-nearing-xs-
| dail...
|
| I misremembered an article from yesterday. It's threads
| that's catching up w twitter.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| It goes up and down. The stats site, not BlueSky, that
| seems to only go down.
| apwell23 wrote:
| but thats due to musk poising the platform not due to
| cutting people.
| mrweasel wrote:
| > it's worth less than half of what he paid for it
|
| But it was always worth less that half of the purchase
| price. The Twitter board completely ripped of Musk.
| Remember that he tried to back out of the deal, arguing
| that he had been lied to in regards to the number of bots
| and actual users.
| miltonlost wrote:
| The Twitter board ripped him off? When he was the one who
| brought in the initial offer? He tried to back out of the
| deal once people told him how foolish he is.
| joering2 wrote:
| > Remember that he tried to back out of the deal, arguing
| that he had been lied to in regards to the number of bots
| and actual users.
|
| True but since he never provided any hard numbers,
| especially after totally owning the thing, makes this
| point moot.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| They ripped him off? He made an unsolicited offer,
| signed, sealed and delivered.
| moomin wrote:
| This argument has been made, at length, in court. It was
| found wanting.
| AtlanticThird wrote:
| Good thing 35% of the country still trusts the courts
| https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-joe-biden-courts-
| ame...
| amrocha wrote:
| 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.
| mrweasel wrote:
| Revenue is meaningless for a company that has never been
| close to covering the cost of building it.
|
| Monthly active users, fair, but it also depends on the
| type of users that remain. My take still is that the
| users X cares about are politicians, journalists and the
| general elite. They are still on X. It doesn't matter
| that some random tech worker switched to Bluesky or
| Mastodon, those were never profitable anyway, complained
| a lot and used third party apps.
| basisword wrote:
| Having those users doesn't matter if the people they are
| trying to communicate with leave - as eventually they
| will too. Every single person I know who used Twitter
| (which was already the least popular of the main social
| networks in my region) has deleted their account.
| Politicians and journalists shouting into a void isn't
| sustainable.
| sjsdaiuasgdia wrote:
| > for a company that has never been close to covering the
| cost of building it
|
| Twitter was profitable in 2018 and 2019
| mrweasel wrote:
| I was going to argue that they lost most of the 2019
| profit in 2020, but you are technically correct (the best
| kind). Twitter probably made around $1.5B in profit ever,
| maybe a little more. That actually should just about
| cover the cost of building the company.
|
| I was wrong.
| jcranmer wrote:
| The people I've seen who have talked about their
| engagement numbers--as measured by something like "how
| many visitors do we get to a story based on a
| Bluesky/Facebook/ex-Twitter/etc. link", so independent of
| the social media's self-reported metrics--have all
| reported that Twitter is generally among the poorest-
| performing social media sites. Especially if you're
| looking at it from a perspective of "how much engagement
| do we get on social media [likes, quotes, replies, etc.]
| per conversion to visiting the site," where it strongly
| looks like Twitter is massively inflating its reported
| engagement.
|
| I don't know how true that was of Twitter pre-Musk
| takeover, especially as many of the most direct
| comparisons didn't exist back then, so I can't say if
| Musk's takeover specifically made it less effective or
| not.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| > The people I've seen who have talked about their
| engagement numbers
|
| Now do bluesky. X is doing fine. Turns out network
| effects are real.
| tristan957 wrote:
| I've seen people report they get better engagement on
| Mastodon and Blue Sky than they ever did with Twitter,
| based on percentages.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| And I've seen people report the complete opposite. Both
| can be true. The reality is BlueSky pushed echo
| chambering even harder than X and it's a dying platform -
| maybe those two things are unrelated but not for me they
| aren't. Unless some miracle happens to reverse its trend,
| BlueSky already had its shot.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Twitter explicitly down ranks off-site links to prevent
| this kind of "conversion".
| egorfine wrote:
| Same opinion. I absolutely hate what he did to Twitter and
| never in my life I will call it "X" - BUT - it looks to me as
| if the engagement is thriving.
|
| Edit: clarified that the _engagement_ is thriving
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| Thriving? Its valuation has tanked since his purchase and
| last I read they're still actively losing users.
| egorfine wrote:
| Yes I know. But the platform has lots and lots of
| engagement. Stagnation did not happen. Quite the
| opposite.
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| My understanding is overall engagement is also currently
| down
| isleyaardvark wrote:
| 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.
| egorfine wrote:
| My bad: I have now edited the comment and clarified that
| I have meant engagement thriving, not financials.
| throw310822 wrote:
| And btw, how many features have been brought live since
| Musk's takeover? If I'm not wrong, at least: long tweets,
| paid subscriptions, community notes, native video (?),
| grok... Anything else? Seems quite a lot after years of
| stagnation.
| martythemaniak wrote:
| From your list, only grok. All the other stuff was already
| there.
| joering2 wrote:
| As a medicore programmer, other than AI I would imagine the
| rest of the list would take 2 weeks to program and
| implement.
| throwpoaster wrote:
| Keep trying, estimation is hard! You'll improve!
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Long tweets: 2017
| (https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/07/twitter-officially-
| expands...)
|
| Subscriptions: 2021
| (https://www.reuters.com/technology/twitter-launches-
| subscrip...)
|
| Community Notes: 2021
| (https://blog.x.com/en_us/topics/product/2021/introducing-
| bir...)
|
| Native video: 2012-2015
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vine_(service) /
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periscope_(service) /
| https://www.videonuze.com/article/twitter-
| unveils-30-second-...)
|
| Musk buys Twitter: late 2022.
|
| That leaves... Grok.
| sunaookami wrote:
| Chronological feed by default with a setting that
| actually sticks, private favorites, new media gallery,
| "E2E" messages.
|
| (side note: Birdwatch was a way better name than
| Community Notes)
| throw310822 wrote:
| Private likes too.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| They renamed favorites to likes. It's the same thing.
| throw310822 wrote:
| Sorry, you're right of course. I was thinking of
| bookmarks.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > Chronological feed by default with a setting that
| actually sticks...
|
| Musk killed third-party clients, which all had that
| already.
|
| > private favorites
|
| To conceal the plunge in activity post-acquisition, and
| to soothe the owner.
| https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-boosted-elon-
| musk-tw...
|
| > new media gallery
|
| We're not really calling a bit of a redesign
| "innovation", are we?
|
| > "E2E" messages
|
| Anything using Twitter for this in a scenario where said
| encryption is _important_ is a loon, IMO. That 's what
| Signal is for.
| throw310822 wrote:
| Thanks for the reply, but you get a number of things
| wrong.
|
| The 2017 "long tweets" are actually 280 characters. 4k
| characters tweets have been introduced in 2023.
|
| The "subscription feature" is a content creator one,
| while I meant paid blue check.
|
| "Community notes" had not been publicly launched before
| Musk did, renaming them from "Birdwatch".
|
| The "native video" feature you mention is Vine, which had
| been discontinued.
|
| Not saying that Musk innovated (doesn't take much to make
| blue checks subscription-based or to increase the length
| of tweets) but he did act decisively to introduce changes
| in the good old Twitter, something the previous CEOs had
| hesitated to do.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > The 2017 "long tweets" are actually 280 characters.
|
| So, longer.
|
| > The "subscription feature" is a content creator one,
| while I meant paid blue check.
|
| I consider the paid blue checks a negative, not a
| positive.
|
| > "Community notes" had not been publicly launched before
| Musk did
|
| As with the long tweets, this then becomes a pretty minor
| tweak.
|
| > The "native video" feature you mention is Vine, which
| had been discontinued.
|
| I mentioned three iterations. The last link, in 2015, is
| the current native video handling.
|
| If I, personally, went to my boss and rattled this off as
| a list of primary personal achievements in the past
| couple of years, they'd say "you're padding things"...
| and I'm a single developer.
| archagon wrote:
| Fundamentally, the problem with Twitter is the burned bridge:
| there is a sizable population of interesting people who will
| _never, under any circumstance_ return due to Musk's insane
| behavior and ideology. This irreparably cripples it as a
| universal social network.
| timeon wrote:
| Good example is here on HN. There used to be at least one
| (often more) Twitter link per day on the front page. Now it
| is around 3 per month.
| ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote:
| >A lot of the users who X need to stay on the platform,
| journalists and politicians, are still there
|
| Twitter/X is the reason DJT became President. It happened
| accidentally (ie against the wishes of Twitter management) in
| 2016, they successfully suppressed him in 2020, and then Elon
| gave MAGA that platform in 2024, leading to DJT's successful
| election.
|
| As long as X is seen a kingmaker, someone will find it
| profitable to own/maintain, even if it doesn't convert Ads
| like Meta/Google.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| If you think twitter made even 1% difference in 2016 I urge
| you to go and touch some grass. This stuff doesn't matter.
| aaronax wrote:
| Way more likely that it was /r/the_donald. In my humble,
| biased opinion--since I was around there but never really
| active on Twitter.
| JSteph22 wrote:
| But Trump won more convincingly in 2024 without it? That
| doesn't support your argument.
| lesuorac wrote:
| Trump won by <1% in an election against a candidate who
| lost her only attempt at a primary and during a time
| period where western incumbents saw a 10+% drop due to
| their handling of covid inflation.
|
| 2024 isn't a story of how Trump outwitted his opponents
| but one of how his opponents tied their shoelaces
| together.
| ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote:
| DJT's use of Twitter in 2016 allowed him to operate
| within his opponents' OODA loops.
|
| DJT and his supporters could craft narratives directly,
| rather than going through traditional media.
|
| DJT's information flow: DJT -> Twitter-based Supporters
| -> News Orgs -> Electorate
|
| Other Candidate's info flows: Candidate -> News Orgs ->
| Electorate
|
| So not only could DJT move faster, but he also didn't
| need permission/buy-in from Editors/Owners of news orgs.
| petersellers wrote:
| > Twitter/X is the reason DJT became President.
|
| I really don't think so, at least not in isolation. It
| probably contributed a small part but the right wing media
| machine is multi-faceted. There were a lot of podcasters
| (i.e. Joe Rogan), comedians and youtubers all publicly in
| support of a second DJT presidency and I think that had a
| much bigger factor overall than Twitter.
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| The media gets their news from Twitter and Twitter drives
| the questions the media asks. It's indirectly a bigger
| factor than you give it credit for.
| sillyfluke wrote:
| To be fair, as I understand it they're saying the
| podcasters were most likely the ones that pushed him over
| the edge this time around. "Small part" meaning 10-15
| percent is not too bad for twitter. And I do think
| rightwing podcasters and tiktok got the young male votes
| out more than twitter did this time around.
|
| I also doubt hispanics and other minorities voted for
| Trump because they were obsessively on twitter. Not being
| able to make ends meet, a weekend at Bernie's president,
| and the over-the-top blank check given to Israel played
| more of a role than Elon buying twitter.
| BeetleB wrote:
| This is far more nuanced (and disputed) than you make it
| out to be.
|
| > It happened accidentally (ie against the wishes of
| Twitter management) in 2016
|
| I think the whole Cambridge Analytica fiasco played a
| bigger role, and I don't think they utilize Twitter. On top
| of that, frankly, TV and his behavior at rallies/debated
| helped him a lot more than Twitter did in 2016. I don't
| know a single MAGA supporter who was even on Twitter in
| 2016.
|
| > they successfully suppressed him in 2020
|
| How? He was banned after the election.
|
| > and then Elon gave MAGA that platform in 2024, leading to
| DJT's successful election.
|
| DJT was not on Twitter in 2024. Did it really make a
| difference when he had his own social network? We all have
| our _opinions_ , but is there actual data supporting this
| for the 2024 election?
| throwpoaster wrote:
| > How? He was banned after the election.
|
| By suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story before the
| election.
| BeetleB wrote:
| It's a stretch to say this would have made a major
| impact. Biden won fairly comfortably. COVID was Trump's
| bad luck.
| the_why_of_y wrote:
| https://www.techdirt.com/2022/12/07/hello-youve-been-
| referre...
| andrewflnr wrote:
| His mistakes cost less than they could have, sure, but to
| call it "pretty successful" I think it would have be better
| than if he just... didn't do much. He didn't have to be as
| open and aggressive about firing people or opening up the
| content policy. Openly insulting advertisers, for instance,
| was a completely unforced error. I think doing less would
| have kept more value (leaving ethics/morality entirely
| aside), and if that's true it's silly to say he managed well.
| consumer451 wrote:
| > pretty successful
|
| What are the metrics of success in this case? Making more
| money, a failure. Moving the Overton window to the very
| far-right, success.
|
| I would argue that the goal is quite obviously the latter,
| and Musk was very open about this. Given that was the goal,
| his takeover of Twitter was extremely successful!
| JeremyNT wrote:
| As a business it's a failure.
|
| As a way to influence public opinion? It's almost invaluable.
|
| For the world's richest man, that's a bargain at half the
| price.
| jbreckmckye wrote:
| I cannot see how it was a success.
|
| 1. He overpaid by tens of billions. That is a phenomenal
| amount of money to lose on an unforced error.
|
| 2. Enough users, who produce enough content, have left to
| make X increasingly a forum for porn bots, scam accounts and
| political activists. It's losing its appeal as the place
| "where the news happens" and is instead becoming more niche.
|
| 3. The firings did not go well. X has struggled to ship new
| features and appears nowhere closer to the "everything app"
| Musk promised. It posts strange UUID error codes. The
| remaining developers seem to implement things primarily
| client side, to the extent I even wonder if they have lost
| their ability to safely roll out backend changes.
|
| 4. The capture of X by far-right agitators has led to long
| term brand damage for Tesla, Musk's most important business
| property.
|
| I can't see any positive outcome from it.
| baobun wrote:
| I don't think DOGE would have happened without it. Maybe
| not even Trump winning the election.
|
| It wasn't good for the company but allowed Musk huge
| influence in politics and likely making it out with some
| really juicy data.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| Most people were betting on X going under in some way or
| another within a year. From that POV, it's survival in
| itself can be seen a success for Musk.
|
| I'm genuinely surprised at the amount of people that stuck
| to it.
| CivBase wrote:
| > It makes X an increasingly niche website.
|
| I did not use Twitter. I do not use X. I'm even less
| inclined to become a user after the Musk takeover. I don't
| even know anyone who is active on X. However, I still
| constantly get linked to tweets and see screenshots of
| tweets (or whatever they're called now). And I never see
| anything from competing platforms.
|
| X may be failing by many metrics, but in terms of
| popularity it is still the undisputed king of its market.
| It's by no means "niche".
| baby wrote:
| It's interesting because, as I'm reading this I agree with
| y'all, it's still stand and I'm still on it. Yet, as a major
| twitter user, who has a large number of followers and has
| benefited from twitter a lot (made many relationships, got a
| job through it, successfully launched a book and a company
| thanks to it, etc.) I seem to be using twitter less and less
| these days.
|
| I dislike Elon, but I need twitter so much that I can't
| leave. And yet, my feed which was so useful in the past, and
| filled with cryptography content, has become pure political
| ragebait content. To the point that it's less and less useful
| to me.
|
| I'm sad because there's just nowhere for me to go, all my
| followers are there.
| fsflover wrote:
| Make a Mastodon account and post to both places
| simultaneously. They say Mastodon brings real discussions
| and engagement.
| guywithahat wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| guywithahat wrote:
| I find this X doomsday talk is pretty isolated to
| reddit/other minor social media sites. The site itself is
| doing fine, and maintains a strong investor/startup
| ecosystem, with a slight fall in usage after the election
| (which isn't uncommon for Twitter/X). My understanding is
| that a few advertisers threatened to leave and then
| returned after a few days/weeks.
|
| It's a private company now so I don't know what their
| revenue looks like but they certainly don't seem to be low
| on cash given how much they've invested in AI. You may not
| use X but it's definitely not "destroyed" lol
| rtkwe wrote:
| It's growing... but from an all time low. Estimates put
| it at half of their ad revenue pre acquisition. A lot of
| advertisers did actually leave and seem to have largely
| stayed away or their CPM numbers are just way way down
| both of which are pretty bad.
|
| Also X isn't funding Grok, it's a separate B corp with
| funding of it's own, it's just been tightly integrated
| into X, so it doesn't really say anything about the money
| situation at Twitter/X.
|
| https://www.reuters.com/technology/x-report-first-annual-
| ad-...
| jjfoooo4 wrote:
| X didn't "invest in AI", it was rolled into a buzzy AI
| company. Before that the holders of it's debt could not
| find buyers (aka buyers willing to bet against X
| bankruptcy)
| baby wrote:
| you realize Threads basically have the same amount of
| daily users now? This should never have happened
| sixothree wrote:
| I feel like I need to shower every time I end up there. The
| place is repulsive to me.
| sergiotapia wrote:
| X saved free speech online. Without Musk acquiring it, we would
| have continued to slip into this franken-Resetera level of
| discourse. Thank God!
|
| X is the platform where everyone can speak as long as it
| doesn't break the law. That's fantastic. If you don't like a
| particular subject, you can just move on. That's what the
| internet was in the 2000s!
| big_toast wrote:
| Saved?
|
| Seems like it harmed the migration to more free protocol
| oriented services. One company controlling the algorithm and
| API to a global conversation. Verified badges getting ranked
| priority in replies and For You. A DM function that barely
| functions. Private chats as a promise instead of
| cryptographic guarantee?
| sergiotapia wrote:
| >free protocol oriented services.
|
| Love all of these on paper, I think any tech person would.
| But they are non-starters. Normies have zero chance of ever
| deciding to use these.
| big_toast wrote:
| Just like all the normies who don't use web browsers,
| email, podcasts, calendars, jpeg image standards. Like
| how btc and ethereum finally died out and companies
| aren't adopting stable coins.
|
| Yes.. non-starters, too complicated and fiddly..
| UncleSlacky wrote:
| > everyone can speak as long as it doesn't break the law
|
| I have one word for you: "cisgender".
|
| https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/x-cisgender-slur-cis-
| elon...
| ixtli wrote:
| what speech specifically did it save?
| lukas099 wrote:
| He _said_ he would reinstate freedom of speech, but did he
| actually? [1][2][3][4]
|
| [1] https://www.newsweek.com/elon-musk-promised-free-speech-
| twit...
|
| [2] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/15/elo
| n-m...
|
| [3] https://www.thefire.org/news/twitter-no-free-speech-
| haven-un...
|
| [4] https://gizmodo.com/10-times-elon-musk-censored-twitter-
| user...
| whalesalad wrote:
| Does it? It is 100% a bot farm full of right-wing propaganda.
| Create a new account and start tweeting. Every single
| like/reply you get will be from a bot pretending to be either
| Elon, or Elon's mom, or someone who has recently won the
| lottery and is going to give it away to all of their followers.
| Every single recommended post you'll get in your feed will be
| the most unhinged q-anon conspiracy shit you can imagine. There
| is zero discourse happening there. It is an echo chamber of
| psychotic individuals.
|
| Threads on the other hand is actually a pretty fun place to be
| these days. I get a lot of interaction with random strangers on
| all kinds of topics, and it is as good or bad as you want it to
| be.
| calmoo wrote:
| I've only been on twitter for a year and at the start my algo
| feed was full of awful crap, but after I followed a few good
| accounts I mostly now just get AI focussed tech stuff. I
| think your experience isn't universal.
| BeetleB wrote:
| Twitter's brand was quite stained before Elon took over, so
| this is really a case of "continuing the brand destruction"
|
| But really, the brand doesn't matter if you can't keep the
| lights on. If Elon has managed to make X profitable, it is more
| successful than Twitter likely would ever have been.
| TheAlchemist wrote:
| I was following fintwit quite a lot at a time, and some
| accounts already moved to Bluesky some time ago. I'm
| periodically checking via nitter, and 90% of answers are spam
| at this point.
|
| It will take some time for complete destruction, but the path
| is quite clear.
| beambot wrote:
| Tesla itself seems primed for a similar fate at an even greater
| magnitude -- the bigger they are, the harder they fall.
| alganet wrote:
| Is this another case of "may this sacrifice appease the rain gods
| and bring forth a good harvest"?
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Perhaps that _and_ "Let me just disembark this sinking ship if
| I may..."
|
| (Sorry she ever boarded?)
| alganet wrote:
| 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.
| bananapub wrote:
| 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.
| delusional wrote:
| The Nazi robot is probably a good signal to get out.
| eqmvii wrote:
| "prepare 3 envelopes" always leaves out the "what to do in
| case of Nazi robot" part.
| dmix wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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"?
| eviks wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Rule #0 is you don't disparage the company on the way out. She
| may even have a contractual obligation not to.
| libraryatnight wrote:
| "This has been wonderful but it's time to step away and spend
| some time with family" lol
| eviks wrote:
| "him" is not a company. Also not saying isn't disparaging.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| tshaddox wrote:
| Replace "entrusting" with "paying."
| dekhn wrote:
| 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.
| justin66 wrote:
| At least she still has her dignity.
| mellosouls wrote:
| Some non-paywalled sources:
|
| 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
| nacho2sweet wrote:
| 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"?
| steveBK123 wrote:
| So do all the other LLMs have a "don't praise hitler" safety
| prompt that Musk insisted be removed from Grok or what?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| The other LLMs don't have a "disbelieve reputable sources" _un_
| safety prompt added at the owner's instructions.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > Maybe training data other companies won't touch
|
| That's a bingo. 3 weeks ago, Musk invited[1] X users to
| Microsoft-Tay[2] Grok by having them share share "divisive
| facts", then presumably fed the over 10,000 responses into
| the training/fine-tuning data set.
|
| 1. https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1936493967320953090
|
| 2. In 2016, Microsoft decided to let its Tay chatbot
| interact, and learn from Twitter users, and was praising
| Hitler in short order. They did it twice too, before
| shutting it down permanently.
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(chatbot)
| thrance wrote:
| I think they just told grok to favor conservative "sources"
| and it became "mechahitler" as the result.
| peab wrote:
| I think it's more so that they push changes quickly without
| exhaustively testing. Compare that to Google, who sits on a
| model for years for fear of hurting their reputation, or
| OpenAI and Anthropic who extensively red teams models
| steveBK123 wrote:
| Why does Grok keep "failing" in the same directional way
| if its just a testing issue?
| neuroelectron wrote:
| Tbf, it must be difficult for LLMs to align all the WWII
| propaganda that's still floating around.
| Macha wrote:
| Given the source of training data is primarily the
| internet, and not say scanned propaganda posters in
| museums, I'd have to imagine all the analyses or things
| attributed to the impact of world war 2 significantly
| outnumber uncritical publications of ww2 propaganda in the
| training sets.
| empath75 wrote:
| 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.
| lukas099 wrote:
| Could you use one LLM to filter out such bad training data
| before using it to train another one? Do they do this
| already?
| redox99 wrote:
| They had literally added (and now removed) a system prompt to
| be politically incorrect. I'm sure no other LLM has that.
|
| https://github.com/xai-org/grok-prompts/commit/c5de4a14feb50...
| intalentive wrote:
| I suspect it has more to do with alignment fine-tuning.
| southernplaces7 wrote:
| 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.
| southernplaces7 wrote:
| Why not respond with an actual rebuttal of these points instead
| of downvoting? Are you 12-year-old schoolkids?
| freejazz wrote:
| I don't think anyone has any interest in "debating" you.
| Personally, I don't get into arguments with people who do not
| seem connected to reality. There is no point in it. That
| seems like the sort of thing a 12 year old would do. You'd
| probably find more purchase with your arguments at an
| adolescent playground anyway.
|
| >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.
|
| Did you not see Grok yesterday? Or the general proliferation
| of disgusting racism all over X since Musk took over? No? Oh
| well. Hence, my point about reality.
| southernplaces7 wrote:
| Hence the idiocy of downvoting.
|
| What's disconnected from reality in what I said? As for
| Grok, so? It's an LLM and all of them are prone to saying
| all kinds of invented bullshit. Are you seriously going to
| get morally scandalized by an LLM parrot, with no self-
| awareness, saying some racist nonsense? It would be better
| to know how it was prompted into this, and by whom, then
| blame them more specifically.
|
| Also note that I was referring to X having the potential to
| be a valuable asset to Musk, and a business asset that
| grows back in value in a financial/user sense. I didn't
| mention any moral considerations. That aside, even if it's
| loaded with racism, do you think other social media
| platforms aren't? Or in other cases, aren't loaded with
| their own brand of intolerant fanaticism?
|
| To call a social network deploraable is fine, but at least
| should be done with a bit of perspective for your own
| personal biases in favor of or against anything, and of
| course, it's useful to remember that something being
| morally deplorable to a bunch of people doesn't translate
| to it being a bad business, or a failure in that sense for
| its owner.
|
| Either way, Musk is definitely a narcissist and almost
| certainly strays off into derangement at times, but a
| stupid man, no, and even with X it's shortsighted to say
| anything about failure.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| I sold a ton of shares on a private secondary market Starter Pack
|
| enjoy the retirement!
| sylens wrote:
| Trying to make it clear she is not responsible for MechaHitler AI
| as if people don't already have her number
| moomin wrote:
| She was still there?
| AIPedant wrote:
| 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 is 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.
|
| [1] https://apnews.com/article/x-ceo-linda-yaccarino-elon-
| musk-g...
| rsynnott wrote:
| Yeah, never understood why she took this job. It could only
| really end one way.
| rtkwe wrote:
| 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).
| banana_giraffe wrote:
| Gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/09/technology/linda-
| yaccarin...
| denysvitali wrote:
| TIL you can "gift" NYTimes articles access. Sounds weird but
| thanks stranger!
|
| Edit: and to pay back (?), https://archive.is/Cn2hA
| elAhmo wrote:
| She was never in charge of anything at X, the title is doing a
| disservice to the public.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I didn't even know that Twitter had a CEO that wasn't Musk.
| Macha wrote:
| Twitter CEO - Chief Excuse Offerer
| thordenmark wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| There are probably cheaper places to retire (that will
| guarantee a longer retirement) than Hawaii - but your idea is
| good
| barbazoo wrote:
| The cheapest option is death, but even that costs you your
| life.
| navigate8310 wrote:
| Defending an unhinged white nationalist would surely attract a
| lot of off-the-hook folks even when you retire.
| martin-t wrote:
| You'd think that but AFAIK, there have only been 2 serious
| attempts to kill Trump and 0 to kill Musk[0] (I don't follow
| US politics much so idk which one of them you're referring
| to). Compare that to the number of mass shootings[1] and car
| rammings for the same period.
|
| It seems most killing is done by crazy people who are content
| to blame and attack society at large for their problems.
| Conversely, sane/intelligent/competent people who are able to
| identify the root causes of injustice rarely use violence.
|
| As a result, you're probably fine as long as other unhinged
| people see you as an ally even if a lot of sane people see
| you as an enemy.
|
| [0]: Apparently he claims 2 so I qualified it with "serious"
| because narcissists are known to inflate their claims and I
| can't be bothered to check his claims.
|
| [1]: Apparently what counts as a mass shooting is very
| inclusive (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vx3aI67iWpA )
| so count only those intended to kill random strangers, not
| targeted attacks.
| Wurdan wrote:
| She could probably pad her paycheques quite a bit with a book
| deal touting insider gossip, too.
| xyst wrote:
| Whoring yourself out to an awful man that has been a
| significant driver towards regressing this country to new lows
| is not a good look, m8.
|
| You would have to hold me at gun point to get me anywhere near
| the shit show at the fuck factory known as Elon Musk.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| She stepped in and did a job, nothing more nothing less. I don't
| see this as a failure, the post-Elon Twitter is not a company
| that operates based on traditional characteristics, and I don't
| know what a CEO even does for such a company. It's obvious that
| Elon put her in charge to appease advertisers, but that gimmick
| only works for so long.
|
| Anyway, I wouldn't have made it as long as she did. Being in
| charge of a cesspool of racist, misogynistic, antisemitic content
| like that is a fate worse than unemployment.
| flockonus wrote:
| X was gobbled by another of Elon's AI company, no doubt to
| reduce some of the mess. So yes, a CEO there effectively does
| nothing.
|
| https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/musks-xai-buys-social-...
| fundad wrote:
| At least she can claim the success of getting the company
| sold, even if it was to a sibling company under X Corp.
| wnc3141 wrote:
| I suspect a professional executive appointment was among the
| terms to finance Musk's purchase of Twitter.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| Oh I really imagined that it said that she was leaving twitter
| (not calling it X) as in leaving the account / social media /
| platform (not the company)
|
| I would prefer if we could have a little more clarity but hey, It
| was funny reading in that way too.
| myko wrote:
| So dumb some people call it "X"
| ctenb wrote:
| She is leaving the company, not the platform
| BryanLegend wrote:
| True. It's a misleading headline.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| She didn't do nothing there
| wnevets wrote:
| I forgot she even existed but atleast she brought mechahitler to
| twitter I guess.
| cma wrote:
| In her farewell tweet:
|
| > Groundbreaking innovations like community notes
|
| This existed on Twitter before Musk bought Twitter, and was
| likely borrowed from community wiki section on Stack Overflow at
| a minimum, if not from earlier sites. Not an X innovation.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Don't worry, nobody still on Twitter has ever cared about what
| actually happens in reality
| hakanderyal wrote:
| Interesting nobody has mentioned Nikita. X has hired Nikita Bier,
| of Gas and tbh fame (https://x.com/nikitabier), as head of
| product some days ago.
|
| He posted a meme earlier today which may or may not be related to
| this.
| gigatexal wrote:
| Who cares? What I'm curious about is if Elon will pay her what
| she must have negotiated: a golden parachute.
| paxys wrote:
| Despite her CEO title she was _at best_ #2 at the company (behind
| Musk) and I imagine with the xAI buyout she 's now further down
| the ladder. Even going back to her old role (head of advertising
| and partnerships at a $100B+ company) will probably be a step up
| at this point.
| paulvnickerson wrote:
| Linda's tenure was an overwhelming success if you judge it
| according to what her assigned goals probably were:
|
| 1) Moved X out of woke censorship into a highly liberal (in the
| permissive sense of the word) free speech platform, while at the
| same time...
|
| 2) Improved the X brand safety such that nearly all advertisers
| are back on the platform.
|
| We forget how much at odds these two goals were a couple years
| ago, but the overton window has shifted a lot since then so it
| doesn't seem as big a deal.
| joshuamorton wrote:
| 2 years and one month almost to the day makes it seem like she
| waited the minimum time to avoid some bonus clawback and then got
| out.
| martinpw wrote:
| The Economist always comes up with good tag lines for stories. In
| this case:
|
| _Linda Yaccarino goes from X CEO to ex-CEO._
|
| https://www.economist.com/business/2025/07/09/linda-yaccarin...
| awaymazdacx5 wrote:
| * X reported 2024 adjusted earnings before interest, taxes,
| depreciation and amortization of about $1.25 billion and annual
| revenue of $2.7 billion.*
| gpi wrote:
| Who?
| steinbring wrote:
| What value does X equal in that statement?
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