Yaccarino quits as chief executive of Musk’s social media platform X

Linda Yaccarino has said she is stepping down after two years running Elon Musk’s social media platform X.

Ms Yaccarino posted a positive message on Wednesday about her tenure at the company, formerly known as Twitter, and said “the best is yet to come as X enters a new chapter with” Mr Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI, maker of the chatbot Grok.

“Thank you for your contributions,” Mr Musk wrote on X in response to Ms Yaccarino’s announcement.

The billionaire hired Ms Yaccarino, a veteran advertising executive, in May 2023 after buying Twitter for 44 billion US dollars (£32.4 billion) in late 2022 and cutting most of its staff.

He said at the time that Ms Yaccarino’s role would be focused mainly on running the company’s business operations, leaving him to focus on product design and new technology.

In accepting the job, Ms Yaccarino was taking on the challenge of getting big brands back to advertising on the social media platform after months of upheaval following Mr Musk’s takeover.

A number of companies had pulled back on ad spending – the platform’s chief source of revenue – over concerns that Mr Musk’s thinning of content restrictions was enabling hateful and toxic speech to flourish.

Two years later, those concerns have not subsided. A recent update to Grok led to a flood of antisemitic commentary from the chatbot this week that included praise of Adolf Hitler.

“We are aware of recent posts made by Grok and are actively working to remove the inappropriate posts,” the Grok account posted on X early on Wednesday, without being more specific.

Some experts have tied Grok’s behaviour to Mr Musk’s deliberate efforts to mould Grok as an alternative to chatbots he considers too “woke” such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini.

In late June, he 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,” Mr Musk said in the June 21 post. “By this I mean things that are politically incorrect, but nonetheless factually true.”

A similar instruction was later baked into Grok’s “prompts” that instruct it on how to respond, which told the chatbot to “not shy away from making claims which are politically incorrect, as long as they are well substantiated”.

That part of the instructions was later deleted.

“To me, this has all the fingerprints of Elon’s involvement,” said Talia Ringer, a professor of computer science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.