Will Elon let her be more than a ‘CEO in Name Only?’ Also: takeaways from my interview with Mark Zuckerberg, layoffs hit Snap and Epic Games, and more.
The buzz out of the Code Conference this week is, naturally, all about the disastrous performance of X / Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino, who closed out the two-day affair in spectacular fashion. Vox’s Peter Kafka, who has been going to the conference since it started in 2008, called it “the weirdest session I’ve ever seen.” If I had to sum up the vibe as everyone trickled off to dinner afterward, it would be stunned disbelief. As for Yaccarino, she immediately fled the premises with her six-person security detail.
She is the Tom Wambsgans of the industry. If she dies eating shit for Elon, another billionaire will gladly resurrect her and offer her even more money to eat more shit because she did the job so well the first time.
She's even sighted in the wikipedia article "In 2023, Linda Yaccarino was appointed as the CEO of Twitter while the company was facing an uncertain future and a number of challenges, including outages, user discontent and advertiser skepticism. The company lost more than half of its value since its acquisition by Elon Musk six months prior."
I mean if Elon offered me the job as CEO of twitter, I would have absolutely taken it knowing full well I was set up to fail. I don't think Linda was ignorant of that fact. Now she may suck in tons of other ways, but I don't really see how her "performance" at the conference reflects on anyone but herself.
She definitely is a textbook example of a scapegoat woman CEO for an unpopular company, but also she seems to be very aware and supportive of the fascist brain rot she's enabling so I won't shed a tear for her (nor any CEO but you get my point)
While you're technically right, I don't see a material difference between paying with cash and paying with data (Verge sign up is free, but it's still sign up).