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Greetings! 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. Just look at how X’s user experience changed during Yaccarino’s tenure. It feels like Grok has been shoved into every possible nook and cranny of the social media site, including the addition of a Grok button to every single post and Grok-generated responses ranking highly in responses to popular tweets. While this no doubt boosts engagement with the chatbot, helping to improve its capabilities, it doesn’t exactly encourage conversations with other people, which is what made Twitter appealing in the first place. Still, I wouldn’t write off Yaccarino’s time at X as a failure. She lasted much longer than many skeptics expected her to. And she managed to keep a lid on costs while rebuilding some of X’s advertising business despite ongoing problems with spam and hate speech. But it’s clear that Musk’s increased focus on xAI ultimately came at her expense. X hasn’t said when—or even if—it will appoint another X CEO to succeed Yaccarino. But whoever it is will most likely be expected to focus more on using the site to juice xAI than on selling ads. There’s a long history of people splashing cold water in the faces of their employers in the form of truth-telling corporate memos. Nearly two decades ago, Brad Garlinghouse, then a Yahoo executive, wrote an essay that came to be known as the “Peanut Butter Manifesto,” which argued that Yahoo was spreading itself too thin on too many different initiatives. The famous memo that gets Tom Cruise’s character fired from his sports management agency in the 1996 movie “Jerry Maguire” was based on a real, 10,000-word memo that Jeffrey Katzenberg sent to his fellow Walt Disney Co. executives in 1991 warning them about some of the company’s practices. Today, Kalley broke the news of a similar essay written by an outgoing Meta AI researcher, Tijmen Blankevoort, in which he offers his diagnosis for why the company is struggling in artificial intelligence. Among the factors he blames is a “culture of fear” at Meta that has led to an “every person for themselves” mentality and “land-grabbing, project-sniping, stealing work.” The essay crystallizes accounts of corporate dysfunction Kalley has reported on before and is a useful way of filling in the blanks of why Meta has brought in so much outside AI talent lately. Check it out.—Nick Wingfield • Perplexity launched an AI-powered browser called Comet, in another challenge to Google’s search dominance. • Nvidia’s market capitalization reached $4 trillion before falling slightly below that level at the close of trading. It is the first company to hit that milestone. • Kevin Miller, vice president of global data centers at Amazon Web Services, said he plans to leave the company after 17 years. AI Agenda by Stephanie Palazzolo separates hype from reality and explains how AI is transforming industries. The 4x/week newsletter details the innovation and disruption happening in AI, from the AI startup funding frenzy to the major technological breakthroughs that will set the agenda for decades to come. Sign up today. | 
