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’s a scapegoat for money. Elon will blame her for any failings when he finally cuts ties. She will then land safely with a golden parachute.
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 a woman Elon put in power to toss under the bus when his company failed.
Lookup glass cliff. Happened at reddit as well.
And looking back, she was absolutely in the right clearing out those communities.
She wasn’t controversial for banning /r/fatpeoplehate, she was controversial for banning it but not banning subs like /r/the_donald as well.
Was she? Any posts about “why isn’t X banned too?” were buried under an avalanche of reactionary tantrums about losing their platform to discuss hitting children. For the overwhelming majority of users, it was “this goes too far”, not “this doesn’t go far enough”.
Which means that realistically, she never got past the low hanging fruit. These were the days when a lot of these places still had plausible deniability so it was easy to pull in wider support.
My baseless guess is that she came in as CEO and noticed they were handing over some very predictable post histories every time there was a mass shooting but couldn’t come out and say “check out all these domestic terrorists” because it would damage the brand.
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.”
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)
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There’s no paywall on theverge.
Narrator: yes there is
I hit a wall on mobile.
To me, this is the same as a paywall.
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).
Not usually, but I hit one this time
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.
I learned the term “glass cliff” when she was hired.
See also: Canada’s first and only female PM, Kim Campbell
It’s okay Verge, she is not a damsel in distress. She asked for this specifically.
When someone named Kafka says it’s the “weirdest”…that says something!