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Image: Dima Solomin/Unsplash
Linda Yaccarino’s departure as CEO of X on July 9 caught many by surprise.
While reportedly in the works for weeks, the absence of leaks and the timing of her announcement—one day after X’s AI chatbot Grok made antisemitic comments referencing Hitler during a prompt about Texas flooding—sparked heavy online chatter.
Two months later, that chatter has faded, but the executive office remains vacant, with no signs of being filled soon. (Yaccarino, meanwhile, has since taken over as chief executive of eMed Population Health, a digital health company developing a platform for GLP-1 weight-loss drugs.)
X declined to comment on the CEO search, and Elon Musk has only weighed in once, thanking Yaccarino for her contributions on the day she stepped down. If his past remarks are any guide, he’s in no hurry.
“CEO is fake title. You need a president, a controller and a secretary for a C Corp, but all the chief [whatever] officer stuff is superfluous,” Musk wrote on X two years ago. That echoed comments from 2021 at The Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council Summit, when he said “president, secretary and treasurer” were the only meaningful corporate titles. (To underline the point, his title at Tesla is “technoking.”)
On prediction market Polymarket, bettors aren’t expecting an announcement anytime soon: 51% don’t think a decision will come this year, up from 22% the day after Yaccarino left. The current front-runner is serial entrepreneur Nikita Bier, with 19% betting he’ll get the job. Bier, who joined X’s product team as Yaccarino departed, has pushed for “useful content” and a crackdown on AI slop, which he says have boosted App Store downloads.
Musk himself is second on Polymarket, with 10% odds, likely reflecting the assumption he’ll remain the final decision-maker regardless of who holds the CEO title. Other names have low odds, including White House AI policy adviser Sriram Krishnan, X CFO Mahmoud Reza Banki, and Grok itself, each at 4%. Longshot candidates include MrBeast (James Stephen Donaldson), Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey, and former Meta COO Sheryl Sandberg.
Time will tell if the next CEO makes it past Yaccarino’s two-year run.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chris Morris is a contributing writer at Fast Company, covering business, technology, and entertainment. Chris is a veteran journalist with more than 35 years of experience, more than half of which were spent with some of the Internet’s biggest sites, including CNNMoney.com, where he was director of content development, and Yahoo! Finance, where he was managing editor.