Both things can be true: Valuation did drop during her tenure, AND she was not to blame.

Therefore the praise is weird, because she seemingly neither helped nor hurt the business.

What legacy?

She's not a well known public figure. She ran the ad department at NBC. Is now very rich and at age 61, close enough to retirement age.

> her legacy will forever be stained

Where can I sell my legacy for $6 million/year?

The way I see it, her job had two parts - reign in Elon, and then run the show. But she couldn't (or wasn't interested in) doing the first part, and so her tenure was a failure. Gwynne Shotwell at SpaceX does a great job at both, by contrast.

There's a market for CEOs that are "puppets" or managed by another CEO. In that way I doubt her reputation is necessarily stained as anyone making that much money lives in a different world and under different terms than (presumably) you and I do.

She was hired to perform stunt, a nose-dive with the company.

Folks hired for something like that aren’t in it for “legacy”.

(1) She had no power

(2) If she did have power, nothing good happened during her tenure, so what would she even be thanked for?

well, yes. but she now has a much enriched resume

> her legacy will forever be stained

I would like to believe that people can change over time.

She had one job, and that was to get Musk to keep his fucking mouth shut, at which she failed spectacularly.

You may not like Elon Musk but he's doing remarkably well for someone who is "clearly off the rails".

Really good call out. Hitting someone from above & below seems not quite square.

In my view, there was plenty of opportunity to make a mark & do things, even with a ultra involved Musk.

But this person didn't bring much product leadership, didn't have a vision for the product. Having good business relationships might have been its own core competency, but whether Linda's fault or no, suing and going after businesses to try to score some vengeance for your own terrible behavior, and maybe coerce some people back: that's a terrible tactless look, that one would hope a leader like Linda could have helped steer away from.

"The glass cliff is a hypothesized phenomenon in which women are more likely to break the "glass ceiling" (i.e. achieve leadership roles in business and government) during periods of crisis or downturn when the risk of failure is highest."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_cliff

She was mainly brought on to fix relationships with advertisers, they were just pulling out that time because of rampant nazi and hate speech (by users) on the platform, after they fired the content moderation teams. I think she did what she could over the last 2 years and some of the ad revenue came back, but after the latest MechaHitler escapades I guess she got some texts from people...

You might have a point if he didn't ignore every other one of those polls he ran.

Hiring her would be a favour to Elon. She likely knew this when she took the job.

Even if the valuation is the same (seems unlikely), a fairly small rate of inflation on that sum of money is likely to be a number that matters.

Bullshit. Look how normal it is for people on X to cens*r c*rtain w*rds to avoid having their posts downranked.

Arguably a competent person wouldn't have persisted in a role where it was obvious they were not able to make a meaningful difference.

My guess of what they meant; On the assumption she had influence she was unable to use that influence prevent a collapse in value. It's a hedge to cover both options.

Influencing the person pulling the strings is also a key skill. I won’t colour her entire person as inept but perhaps, wrong person wrong time. Musk doesn’t like or need yes men but if you say no him or want to try something different, you better have a well thought out idea/plan. There lies the challenge. How do you impress upon a very intelligent individual ever so often? Very few can.

It's literally impossible to post anything on any interesting subreddit right now, your post will just repeatedly get deleted.

Possibly leakycap is thinking about 02012 and you're thinking about 02018. In that case you'd both be right about Twitter.

> liberal echo chamber

It skews one way, but there's definitely a large diversity in opinions on Reddit that are not hard to find. It's also transitioning into an India social media site, just from sheer population numbers.

All caps don't make it true.

I think the “everyone is here” feeling is because the media outlets use it quite a bit. So even though mostly everyone is not on Twitter it felt like anyone who is anyone was on Twitter. I don’t really miss the FOMO that was intended to produce but I imagine if you played along it validated the FOMO some how.

You'd think that but AFAIK, there have only been 2 serious attempts to kill Trump and 0 to kill Musk[0] (I don't follow US politics much so idk which one of them you're referring to). Compare that to the number of mass shootings[1] and car rammings for the same period.

It seems most killing is done by crazy people who are content to blame and attack society at large for their problems. Conversely, sane/intelligent/competent people who are able to identify the root causes of injustice rarely use violence.

As a result, you're probably fine as long as other unhinged people see you as an ally even if a lot of sane people see you as an enemy.

[0]: Apparently he claims 2 so I qualified it with "serious" because narcissists are known to inflate their claims and I can't be bothered to check his claims.

[1]: Apparently what counts as a mass shooting is very inclusive (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vx3aI67iWpA ) so count only those intended to kill random strangers, not targeted attacks.

The cheapest option is death, but even that costs you your life.

I cannot see how it was a success.

1. He overpaid by tens of billions. That is a phenomenal amount of money to lose on an unforced error.

2. Enough users, who produce enough content, have left to make X mostly a forum for porn bots, scam accounts and political activists. It makes X an increasingly niche website.

3. The firings did not go well. X has struggled to ship new features and appears nowhere closer to the "everything app" Musk promised. It posts strange UUID error codes. The remaining developers seem to implement things primarily client side, to the extent I even wonder if they have lost their ability to safely roll out backend changes.

4. The capture of X by far-right agitators has led to long term brand damage for Tesla, Musk's most important business property.

I can't see any positive outcome from it.

It's interesting because, as I'm reading this I agree with y'all, it's still stand and I'm still on it. Yet, as a major twitter user, who has a large number of followers and has benefited from twitter a lot (made many relationships, got a job through it, successfully launched a book and a company thanks to it, etc.) I seem to be using twitter less and less these days.

I dislike Elon, but I need twitter so much that I can't leave. And yet, my feed which was so useful in the past, and filled with cryptography content, has become pure political ragebait content. To the point that it's less and less useful to me.

I'm sad because there's just nowhere for me to go, all my followers are there.

His mistakes cost less than they could have, sure, but to call it "pretty successful" I think it would have be better than if he just... didn't do much. He didn't have to be as open and aggressive about firing people or opening up the content policy. Openly insulting advertisers, for instance, was a completely unforced error. I think doing less would have kept more value (leaving ethics/morality entirely aside), and if that's true it's silly to say he managed well.

>A lot of the users who X need to stay on the platform, journalists and politicians, are still there

Twitter/X is the reason DJT became President. It happened accidentally (ie against the wishes of Twitter management) in 2016, they successfully suppressed him in 2020, and then Elon gave MAGA that platform in 2024, leading to DJT's successful election.

As long as X is seen a kingmaker, someone will find it profitable to own/maintain, even if it doesn't convert Ads like Meta/Google.

As a business it's a failure.

As a way to influence public opinion? It's almost invaluable.

For the world's richest man, that's a bargain at half the price.

And btw, how many features have been brought live since Musk's takeover? If I'm not wrong, at least: long tweets, paid subscriptions, community notes, native video (?), grok... Anything else? Seems quite a lot after years of stagnation.

I think it’s hard to conclude that the people weren’t needed given how spectacularly it tanked.

Well sure if you give up on moderation, and close the platform to people who aren't signed in, and shut off the API then yes you didn't need the people supporting those parts of the platform.

And I guess if you consider "the place with the MechaHitler AI" as good branding there's no arguing with you that it's doing just as well as Twitter.

Fundamentally, the problem with Twitter is the burned bridge: there is a sizable population of interesting people who will never, under any circumstance return due to Musk’s insane behavior and ideology. This irreparably cripples it as a universal social network.

Same opinion. I absolutely hate what he did to Twitter and never in my life I will call it "X" - BUT - it looks to me as if the engagement is thriving.

Edit: clarified that the engagement is thriving

There's no technical reason that one couldn't move from platform to platform and link identities - the restrictions around IP and platform lock-in only benefit the platform owner, ensuring that competition will be stifled rather than the platform made useful for its users.

The sad part is that ad networks know more about our connections across platforms than we're allowed to.

They had managed to get a verb into relatively common speech and their revenue has collapsed since the Musk take over I'd say it's pretty thoroughly destroyed.

I’ve only been on twitter for a year and at the start my algo feed was full of awful crap, but after I followed a few good accounts I mostly now just get AI focussed tech stuff. I think your experience isn’t universal.

Your post gets shadow banned for the word cisgender on X... the only speech it saved was low effort trolling, misinformation and hate speech. Musk's version of free speech is just changing the dials on the moderation machines to boost speech he prefers and shadow ban speech his doesn't.

Oh for sure, it's so important we should restart the count of years to mark the significance. 2022 will be year 1, the rest 'Anno X'

Legitimately can't tell if this is sarcasm or not. Saved free speech??

>..and 3 years later has a combined valuation with xAI of $113B.

This might be like Stacey King, a Chicago Bulls player, jokingly claiming he and Michael Jordan "combined to score 70 points" on a night when Jordan scored 69 points

> ..and 3 years later has a combined valuation with xAI of $113B.

Haha...ok. I gave a bunch of stock from one of my companies to another one of my companies and made up a value during the transaction.

xAI tried to raise $20 billion in equity in April but wound up with only $5 billion & had to issue $5 billion in junk bonds last week. You can value yourself $44 billion but the market doesn’t think it’s anywhere close

To misquote an adage: Elon Musk can stay irrational longer than I can stay solvent.

He said he would reinstate freedom of speech, but did he actually? [1][2][3][4]

[1] https://www.newsweek.com/elon-musk-promised-free-speech-twit...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/15/elon-m...

[3] https://www.thefire.org/news/twitter-no-free-speech-haven-un...

[4] https://gizmodo.com/10-times-elon-musk-censored-twitter-user...

> everyone can speak as long as it doesn't break the law

I have one word for you: "cisgender".

https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/x-cisgender-slur-cis-elon...

Saved?

Seems like it harmed the migration to more free protocol oriented services. One company controlling the algorithm and API to a global conversation. Verified badges getting ranked priority in replies and For You. A DM function that barely functions. Private chats as a promise instead of cryptographic guarantee?

what speech specifically did it save?

Even barring a contractual obligation, "do I want to be the target of an angry tweetstorm that might result in real death threats" is a consideration.

Just wait until Musks enters his "John Mcaffee in exile(but with much more resources)" era, which I think is going to come soon. Then all these people will talk.

Or maybe his "Howard Hughes in Hiding" era. Remains to be seen which route he takes. Could also be "Rasputen shot in the ** era" if hes not careful.

"This has been wonderful but it's time to step away and spend some time with family" lol

"him" is not a company. Also not saying isn't disparaging.

I mean more generally, in the sense that all public executive firings done to increase stock value (or prevent it from falling) are not that different from sacrificial cults.

Yes, I thought it meant she was deleting her Twitter account while remaining CEO!

"Chief [Executive Officer]" isn't a role on the platform, it's a role with the company.

At least she can claim the success of getting the company sold, even if it was to a sibling company under X Corp.

It's gotta be more than that too though. Maybe training data other companies won't touch? Hidden prompt they aren't publishing? Etc.

Clearly Musk has put his hand on the scale in multiple ways.

Tbf, it must be difficult for LLMs to align all the WWII propaganda that's still floating around.

Could you use one LLM to filter out such bad training data before using it to train another one? Do they do this already?

I'd take a pretty shitty job for $6 million dollars a year in salary before bonuses. Especially when everyone knows I'm not the one actually making the decisions so all the failures can get laid at someone else's feet (appropriately).

I feel like most people that say WeChat is a super app haven't actually used it for any period of time. WeChat achieves their "able to do everything" by embedding sub apps within the app. Switching between them is jarring, and is sometimes less smooth than just opening a different app. Saying WeChat is a super app is like saying an app store is a super app.

Yes most of their revenue growth is expected to be as the everything app (or a video platform?).

Musk has said over and over he doesn't care about advertising revenue, he mangled a quote from the Princess Bride to say "I don't care" and then he said if advertisers try to blackmail him with money (even stranger phrasing) they could go f*ck themselves.

[https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-misquotes-princess...] [https://www.forbes.com/sites/briansolis/2023/12/05/elon-musk...]

I think gaining the influence to fire regulators investigating his companies was what he wanted.

BTW he sold Twitter to another subsidiary of X Corp, I wonder if he paid back the debt from the LBO of Twitter.

Change a few words and this describes every social platform including this one. Your comment is evidence, and so is this one.

It is weird that “political correctness” has been taken to mean, like, being polite and nice to people or something.

A politically correct answer is one that keeps the currently politically powerful people happy, right? Musk/Trump defined politically correct for a couple months. I guess Musk might be politically incorrect now. Are they friends or enemies today?

It is very much not a solved problem. Because the implication behind search is not "well the result you need is technically in the result set", it's "the result you need as at the top", and that remains an extremely difficult problem for anything but a trivial scale.

Basic term based retrieval has been solved for 30+ years

The problem is ranking and relevance

They've had an inverted index of all tweets since 2008 (when they acquired Summize).

They added a vector index a year and a half ago for a "see related tweets" feature - https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1720314092269822242 - though as far as I can tell that feature doesn't exist any more, presumably replaced by the ask Grok button.

After Elon fired 80% of the staff, I think we can assume that most of the organizational hurdles were effectively gone, and that it was the perfect time for a cowboy developer to jump in and fix something that would have been stopped by conservative approaches and team work before.

If search could have been solved by a single smart person, it would have been done long ago. In the Bay Area, finding a world class researcher (in distributed systems, databases, text search or whatnot) able to do a short stint at a company to tackle a hard problem isn't particularly hard.

Making big promises and then underdelivering seems like his MO in general. His AI hardware startup went from "AMD makes quality AI hardware but bad software, I'm raising money to completely rewrite the entire AMD software/driver stack to make it better for AI, how hard can it be?" to him complaining to AMD about buggy drivers and AI tooling (when the whole point of his company was throwing all that out and writing new ones from scratch) to him giving up on AMD and selling nVidia AI compute boxes like everyone else.

This is just delusional. It was obvious to everyone she was in an impossible job with a megalomaniacal boss ,and not only did she not get fired, she actually lasted 2 years and left on her own terms. I think she'll be just fine.

At least they are trying to name the team based on the city they are in, where the Dallas Cowboys haven't been in Dallas since the the early 70s. They trained in a city not Dallas while their stadium was in yet another not Dallas city. Now, their stadium is in yet another not Dallas city, and headquarters/training is yet a different not Dallas city.

With the A's, you could at least be close by going to the city in their name.

That paragraph must have been recently edited in (and thereby validating OP's complaint) as it isn't in the archive/paywell circumventing version at https://archive.ph/9zvHZ. For those of us without a NYT subscription, can you tell us whether it puts any description to "the incident with Grok"?

“prepare 3 envelopes” always leaves out the “what to do in case of Nazi robot” part.

She was was never the chief, only the chief's main administrator.

You don't think Elon went behind her back constantly? You think the next CEO will have more to say? She pretended to be in charge, she got paid, good for her. What are you hoping for. X is a dump, and the sooner it goes away the better for everybody.

Her only true role was to fulfill Musk's silly promise to step down as CEO after a public vote. https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1604617643973124097

She was CEO of X which was sold to xAI. I'm not sure she had any control over Grok.

Physical restraint is the only thing that would stop him and I imagine he rolls with security so…

There's only one way to stop Elon Musk from doing erratic, value-destroying things like that, and that's to ambush him in the parking lot with a tire iron.

Yaccarino doesn't strike me as the type.

It's just the prompt: https://github.com/xai-org/grok-prompts/commit/c5de4a14feb50...

People who don't understand llms think saying don't shy away from making claims that are politically incorrect means it won't PC. In reality saying that just makes things associated with politically incorrect more likely. The /pol/ board is called politically incorrect, the ideas people "call" politically incorrect most of all are not Elon's vague centrist stuff it's the extreme stuff. LLMs just track probable relations between tokens, not meaning, it having this result based on that prompt is obvious.

> Not defending Elon or the infobot but my theory is that by leaving that LLM unfiltered people have learned how to gamify and manipulate it into having a fascist slant.

We don't need a theory that explains how Grok got a fascist slant, we know exactly what happened: Musk promise to remove the "woke" from Grok, and what's left is Nazi. [1]

[1] https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2025/07/08/tech/grok-ai-antisemitism

I'm out of the loop, why is it an "infobot" and not a chatbot?

It sure didn’t seem to take much manipulation from what I saw. “Which 20th century figure would solve our current woes” is pretty mild input to produce “Hitler would solve everything!”

> it's not likely actual neo-nazi's, they are too dumb to manipulate an infobot.

No they are not. There exist brilliant people and monkeybrains across the whole population and thus the political spectrum. The ratios might be different, but I am pretty sure there exist some very smart neo-nazis

No, that's definitely not what happened. For quite a while Grok actually seemed to have a surprisingly left-leaning slant. Then recently Elon started pushing the South African "white genocide" conspiracy theory, and Grok was sloppily updated and started pushing that same conspiracy theory even in unrelated threads. Last week Elon announced another update to Grok, which coincided with this dramatic right-wing swing in Grok's responses. This change cannot be blamed on public interactions like Microsoft's Tay, it's very clearly the result of a deliberate update, whether or not these results were intentional.

That LLM is incredibly filtered, just in a different way from others. I suspect by "retraining" the model Elon actually means that they just updated the system prompt, which is exactly what they have done for other hacked in changes like preventing the bot from criticizing Trump/Elon during the election.

The bot has said fairly horrendous stuff before, which would cross the line for most people. It had not, however, previously called itself 'MechaHitler', advocated the holocaust, or, er, whatever the hell this is: https://bsky.app/profile/whstancil.bsky.social/post/3ltintoe...

It has gone from "crossing the line for most ordinary decent people" to "crossing the line for anyone who doesn't literally jerk off nightly to Mein Kampf", which _is_ a substantive change.

Not at this level, no.

Grok, the xAI chatbot, went full neo-nazi yesterday:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jul/09/grok-ai-p...

grok yesterday.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44504709 ("Elon Musk's Grok praises Hitler, shares antisemitic tropes in new posts"—16 hours ago; 89 comments)

see here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44510635

Related discussions from the past 12 hrs for those catching up:

Elon Musk's Grok praises Hitler, shares antisemitic tropes in new posts

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44504709

Musk's AI firm deletes posts after chatbot praises Hitler

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44507419

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Twitter was far left propaganda site.

I don't think anyone has any interest in "debating" you. Personally, I don't get into arguments with people who do not seem connected to reality. There is no point in it. That seems like the sort of thing a 12 year old would do. You'd probably find more purchase with your arguments at an adolescent playground anyway.

>I simply don't see the destructiveness and failure that many people, here on this site and elsewhere have ranted about with Musk buying Twitter.

Did you not see Grok yesterday? Or the general proliferation of disgusting racism all over X since Musk took over? No? Oh well. Hence, my point about reality.