Why Elon Musk's AI Focus Doomed Linda Yaccarino Oh, how times have changed! Just two years ago, Elon Musk hired Linda Yaccarino as the CEO of Twitter with a mandate to clean up relationships with advertisers, many of whom were worried about their products showing up next to hate speech. On Wednesday, Yaccarino unexpectedly announced her departure at a time when the merger of X with Musk's AI startup xAI had essentially downgraded her role to the head of the combined company's social media division. It probably didn't bode well for Yaccarino's diplomatic outreach to advertisers that xAI's Grok chatbot on Tuesday went viral for repeatedly praising Adolf Hitler on X. Yaccarino could well have been planning to leave X before the bad publicity about Grok's misbehavior emerged (The New York Times reported as much), but the problem exemplifies a tension that's been brewing for a while: xAI is clearly more important than X to Musk nowadays, and what's good for xAI isn't necessarily good for X's business or users.