The Tragedy of Linda Yaccarino

When Linda Yaccarino resigned from X (née Twitter), it was the exit many had predicted, yet it still felt shocking. Yaccarino had held onto her chief executive job with the ferocity of a fanatical shopper clutching the last Labubu.

I wrote about Linda Yaccarino in a short story called “The Banality of CINO”—CINO being CEO In Name Only. It was a nod to Hannah Arendt’s chilling assessment of Adolf Eichmann’s banal evil. The comparison may sound extreme, but stay with me. Like Eichmann, Yaccarino seemed capable of deluding herself into believing that the rules of success as defined by her organization were the only true morality. Eichmann organized train schedules. Yaccarino organized ad partnerships with a hate speech platform. Both were slavishly devoted to men they considered to be successful. Both were blindly following the amoral logic of their ambition. Both lacked the capacity to see the world from anyone else’s point of view.

In an interview early in her tenure, Linda Yaccarino spouted self-soothing slogans like “It’s a new day at X!” and described working for Musk as “exhilarating to the point of intoxicating”. She never acknowledged the suffering of former head of Twitter security Yael Roth, who was forced into hiding when Elon Musk accused him of being a pedophile.

When Yaccarino left her high-powered post at NBCUniversal where she managed a team of thousands and $10B in revenue to join the Elon Musk Circus with $0.5B revenue, many were baffled. She wasn’t an obvious fit for Silicon Valley’s frat-boy culture. A polished Madison Avenue executive stepping into the chaos of Musk’s Twitter? It was like sending a librarian into a bar fight. She never fit in. Yaccarino referred to Twitter as “the funniest place on Earth” but never learned how to speak its spiky language. Her tweets read like a cringey HR commentary at a cage match.

But the part that stays with me, the part that saddens me most about the Linda Yaccarino experience, is this: she did it for the title. For the prestige. For the seductive three-letter acronym: CEO. Except she wasn’t a CEO. Not really. She had the nameplate, but not the power. The power always resided with Musk. In the end, she was “layered” when Musk added xAI atop Linda’s X and left her holding a bag filled with Nazi memes, porn, and cratering ad revenue.

It’s tempting to imagine Yaccarino’s exit as an act of conscience. She walked after Grok, the company’s AI chatbot, declared itself to be the second coming of Hitler. But if this were about morality, she would’ve left long ago. She stayed through the reinstatement of white nationalists, through the lawsuits against advertisers, through the destruction of trust that took years to build. Her resignation was less a stand against antisemitism than an opportunistic exit that carried only the slightest whiff of principle.

Linda Yaccarino could have been so much more. A woman CEO in tech is rare. A woman with her platform could have been a force for decency, for accountability, for innovation. Instead, she chose ambition over ethics. She sold her soul to the world’s richest bully and got nothing in return but a sarcastic “thank you for your contributions” from a boss who won’t miss her, and name recognition as a punchline.

Linda Yaccarino wanted to be someone, to be a CEO. But in chasing the title, she lost the thread. Did she ever know what she stood for? Will she add CEO to her tombstone?

On the opposite end of the self-awareness spectrum is golfer Scottie Scheffler who made headlines recently when he shared that his success on the golf course is meaningless. He said he would quit golf the moment his job affects his relationships with loved ones.

Other than her desire for a title, and a belief in the freedom to speak like Elon, Linda Yaccarino never paused to think about what it all meant.

And that’s the real tragedy of Linda Yaccarino…and all the many Yaccarinos out there.

Whether we’re aware of it or not, there are forces both within ourselves and in the world around us that prefer we didn’t think. So let’s think. Let’s think about what we’re doing when we go to work, why we’re doing it, and who is being affected.

Let’s not get yaccarinoed by our jobs. Let’s all get totally schefflered.