Everything I Learned About Corporate Leadership From Linda Yaccarino

Twitter is so, so screwed.

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

At this point, the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World does not particularly care what happens to Twitter. The site was very good to me during the pre-Elon Musk days — I even got a book out of it. In its last, dying days before Musk took over, the old birdsite helped me successfully launch Drezner’s World. The balkanization of social media since Musk’s takeover pretty much confirms two things. First, Musk does not really know what he’s doing when it comes to running Twitter. Is there anyone who believed ex ante that Musk would improve Twitter that continues to believe it ex post and is not on Musk’s payroll?¹ Second, in doing what he’s done, Musk has ended Twitter as a focal point for news and commentary. It’s still relevant, but in a world of BlueSky, Mastodon, Post, Threads, and even Substack, it matters way less than it used to.

This is all to say that at this point it does not really matter what happens to Twitter or X or whatever the fuck Elon will be calling it next month. For most of 2023 and beyond, it’s just about rubbernecking at a trainwreck.

This brings me to Hannah Murphy’s Financial Times profile of Twitter’s quasi-CEO Linda Yaccarino. I might have read more extraordinary business stories this calendar year. After reading Murphy’s, however, I can’t remember any of the previous ones. This story is that extraordinary. Here are my takeaways:

1. Is Elon Musk the Chief Executive Toddler? Quite possibly! Although Murphy’s story is ostensibly about Yaccarino, there’s a lot about Elon Musk in it. And as hard as I want to resist overgeneralizing the toddler metaphor, it sure seems to apply to Musk! Murphy quotes one Musk associate as follows: “You will not get to control Elon, you have to roll with the punches and channel him. If he says the sky is bright pink, you have to say you’re excited the sky is pink.” She also reports, “Musk, according to multiple former and current staffers, runs X from his iPhone. To break through, do not send him attachments or documents or spreadsheets. Put everything inside the body of the email. Find a way to make a simple graph fit inside the text box. Take screenshots and embed them…. Musk, according to insiders, is focused on innovating X’s user experience for one end-user in particular: himself. And he intends to use it exactly as he pleases.” So, in essence, the guy who owns Twitter has the attention span of a two-year old, the selfishness of a petulant child, and the narcissism of a spoiled brat. This does not sound like someone who will be a successful manager. Which leads me to…

2. Twitter rides or dies with whether Musk’s instinct are accurate. Some chief executives want their subordinates to provide critical feedback if they disagree with a call. Based on Murphy’s reporting, Musk is not one of those chief executives: “One former senior staffer, who worked under Musk, says he seeks out employees who can balance ‘measured pushback’ with capitulation to his whims. Another says the billionaire chooses ‘effective operators who are happy doing the bidding of someone else without question’ over those with strong opinions.” The entire interview makes it clear that Yaccarino is willing to do Musk’s bidding. If Musk is right, no problem. If not… hoo boy. Because…

3. Yaccarino might be the least powerful CEO ever. I am not an expert in corporate governance, but it would be hard to deny that Yaccarino exercises only minimal control over the company. According to Murphy, “[Musk] remains the chief technology officer, executive chair and owner of X…. Big announcements, such as the X rebrand or the August proposal to scrap the site’s blocking feature have come from Musk, not Yaccarino.” That is not a lot of autonomy! Furthermore, even the few authoritative statements Yaccarino makes in the interview have been flatly contradicted by Musk. For example, Yaccarino assured the FT that Twitter was staffing up its electoral integrity group by “expanding the safety and election teams all around the world to focus on combating things like manipulation, surfacing of inauthentic accounts and closely monitoring the platform for any emerging threats.” Unfortunately for Yaccarino’s credibility, in reality the company “cut more than half of its global election disinformation workforce.” Indeed, Musk confirmed this in a tweet: “Oh you mean the ‘Election Integrity’ Team that was undermining election integrity? Yeah, they’re gone.” Why should any reporter, colleague, or subordinate believe anything Yaccarino says about Twitter from here on in? For that matter…

4. Yaccarino has no idea what freedom of speech actually means and why content moderation might be a good idea. Yaccarino agrees with Musk on the need to preserve freedom of speech. She tells Murphy multiple times, “What binds us together is our belief in the freedom of speech and the freedom of expression.” She goes on to note that freedom of speech “only works when someone you don’t agree with says something you don’t agree with.” When confronted with Murphy’s pushback on Twitter’s empowering of certain forms of hate speech, however, she goes mute. The interview’s kicker also makes it clear that Yaccarino has been taken aback at being the target of abuse: “The thing that weighs on me a great deal is the pressure and the burden of the intense and relentless public scrutiny. I don’t know if any human being could anticipate or prepare for that. It’s hard. It’s hard on me. It’s hard on my family, my children, my parents, and that, I would say, in the first 100 days is a continual learning process to balance that.” Yaccarino concludes, “While I did have a very outward facing or high-profile role in my last job, certainly the intensity is very different. That hits big.” It would be great if Yaccarino devoted even a few minutes of her day to imagining what it must be like to be the target of even more powerful people’s speech. She might then realize that platitudes about free speech will not address the problems that Musk has created with his new plaything. I doubt she will, however, which means…

5. This will end very badly for Yaccarino. Murphy writes, “Those close to Yaccarino say there is still a chance moving to X could look like a stroke of genius, in retrospect. If she fails to deliver, the blame is likely to fall squarely on Musk. If she succeeds, she will have done the impossible.” Sorry, that dog won’t hunt. At multiple moments in the story, Yaccarino displays complete ignorance about Musk pronouncements regarding Twitter. Then there’s this passage: “I ask Yaccarino, who was vocal at NBCUniversal about the need for more robust metrics and measurement in advertising, if she really believes the ADL has lost the company half of its value. She doesn’t answer.”² Throughout the entire interview, Yaccarino demonstrates she has only one useful skill: the ability to be the loyal soldier to whomever is at the top. This makes her a useful flack. It also demonstrates her complete inability to actually lead anything.

In short: enjoy watching the Twitter car crash. Musk seems ill-equipped to run the place, and Yaccarino seems extremely ill-equipped to do anything other than cover for Musk.

1. It’s a serious question. Have folks like Matthew Yglesias or James Pethokoukis changed their mind about Musk’s stewardship? It’s a real question, I haven’t been following this discourse all that closely.

2. Since her FT interviews, Yaccarino’s response to the questions about Anti-Semitism on the site have managed to get worse, which I hadn’t believed to be possible.