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Linda Yaccarino, CEO of social media platform X, was the headline guest at Vox Media’s Code 2023 event earlier this week. CNBC’s Julia Borsten interviews CEO-elect Elon Musk, who is tasked with bringing advertisers back to the platform formerly known as Twitter.
As you may have noticed, thanks to all the social media buzz surrounding the event, the interview did not go well for Yacarino.
In case you missed it, Mashable has broken down the most interesting moments of Yaccarino’s destruction of the interview at the tech conference.
X has lost millions of daily active users.
As Mashable previously reported, Linda Yaccarino provided new daily active user stats for X at the event. According to Yacarino, X currently has 225 million daily active users. After the conference, X revised the number and claimed that the number of daily active users was actually 245 million.
Regardless of which number is correct, it’s a drop in daily active users of the platform.
It’s been over 10 months since Musk. Shared daily active user metrics of X. In November 2022, a week before acquiring the company, he said Twitter had 254.5 million daily active users. As of mid-November, Twitter had 259.4 million users.
So, X has lost millions of daily active users and now has fewer than before Musk took over nearly a year ago.
A last-minute appearance by Joel Roth.
Much of the controversy surrounding Yaccarino’s interview has to do with his vexatious handling of last-minute additions to the event’s program.
Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former head of trust and safety, was inducted into the Code23 conference on the day of the event. Roth was in charge of issues related to user safety and moderation, which Musk has often been criticized for. Notably, Roth fled his home last year after Musk publicly attacked him on the platform.
While Yaccarino knew about Ruth’s addition before she even took the stage, and spoke about an hour before the interview began, Ruth’s interview was one of the main things Yaccarino wanted to talk about. was
Perhaps one of the more awkward moments was when Yaccarino claimed that, after targeting Musk, some of the hate Roth received was off the Twitter platform. That completely ignores the fact that the bulk of it happened on the app, and any hate it got elsewhere was first incited by its owner — Yacarino’s boss, Elon Musk — and it’s Twitter. happened on
The X CEO doesn’t have the X app on its home screen.
Perhaps the most viral moment of Yaccarino’s interview wasn’t even about what he said.
At one point during Boorstin’s questioning, Yaccarino held up his mobile device and promoted X as a place where real-time conversations about events were taking place. His point was that X was the go-to platform for those important conversations about news and culture, and as such is known through the mobile app.
The tweet may have been deleted.
A problem. As Very Eagle-eyed Viewers See, it appears that the X CEO doesn’t have the X app on his smartphone’s home screen. Yaccarinno presented the phone to the crowd and the X app was nowhere to be seen. Interestingly, apps for Facebook, Instagram and Signal made it onto Yacarino’s home screen.
Yacarino says the advertisers are back. Musk says otherwise.
Yaccarino claimed X is about to break even — and is looking to turn a profit early next year. It said 90 percent of the top 100 advertisers have returned to the platform, including small businesses and brands such as AT&T, Visa and Nissan.
However, Yacarino’s claims are the exact opposite of what Musk said earlier this month when he Accused Anti-Defamation League (ADL) for a 60 percent cut in X’s US advertising revenue.
Half of Twitter’s biggest advertisers finished His ad campaigns on the platform shortly after Musk acquired the company in October 2022 Reports From The New York Times It found that advertising in the spring was down 59 percent year-over-year. Months later, Musk Confirmed that the company was still experiencing “negative cash flow” as of July, due to a “high debt burden” and a 50 percent drop in advertising revenue.
Defending Musk and His Role in X
Easily the most controversial point in the interview was when Boorstin questioned Yaccarino about his actual role in X. Musk chose Yaccarino as CEO of the company. However, Musk still leads departments at the company – such as product, which are typically overseen by the company’s CEO.
X CEO Linda Yacarino and CNBC’s Julia Borsten
Credit: Jarrod Harris/Getty Images for Vox Media
There have been many moments where Yacarino looked blindsided by Musk. As he suddenly announced that Twitter will now be called X. Almost a day had passed since Yacarino, the company’s CEO, issued a statement.
And another great example of this happened in real time in Code 23.
When Burston asked Yaccarino about Musk’s apparent plan from earlier this month to set up a paywall for X, Yaccarino He seemed clueless That Musk came up with the idea of ​​charging all X users. When asked if she didn’t know about the project, she dismissed the suggestion, saying that she and Musk talk about everything.
But, it seems quite clear that she was unaware of the matter. Why? Because she also seemed unaware that Musk later claimed He never originally planned to move to an all-compensation model and his words were misconstrued.
Still, Yacarino seems to be a fan of Musk. He defended Musk’s feud with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). He even repeated his talking points about how the ADL had somehow strayed from its initial mission of focusing on anti-Semitism when it partnered with groups like the NAACP and pushed advertisers. That they stop their Twitter campaigns due to issues with moderation of hate speech content. According to the ADL, however, its mission has always included the civil rights of Jews as well as other minority groups.
When asked how much power he actually has at the company, with Musk still heading up the product department, he responded by asking, “Who wouldn’t want Elon Musk to be with them? sitting with the product?”
Audience members laughed and some even raised their hands.
