It’s not easy to convince your company’s owner to remove the poop emoji email from the PR department’s automatic reply workflow, but Linda Yaccarino can surely bring up that accomplishment in her future job interviews. Yaccarino announced Wednesday that she would step down as CEO of X, a role she assumed two years ago after Elon Musk bought the company for $44 billion.

She had her work cut out from the start. Musk acquired the social media app formerly known as Twitter in October 2022 after a highly publicized back-and-forth and quickly shook up the company with mass layoffs and a loosening of content moderation policies. The moderation changes spooked advertisers: Monthly ad revenue from Twitter’s top 1,000 advertisers fell from $127 million in October 2022 to $48 million in January 2023.

In comes the “velvet hammer”

Nicknamed for her stellar negotiation skills, Yaccarino joined the company (now named X) as CEO in May 2023, following 11 years at NBCUniversal. Experts saw the hire as a way to win back advertisers. Even when Musk told advertisers who didn’t want to return to the platform to “Go f--- yourself,” Yaccarino defended the sentiment (but not the delivery).

Despite the challenges, her time at the top had some wins:

• Some big advertisers returned, though in some cases only after X made legal threats.
• Yaccarino courted small business advertising and renewed X’s partnership with the NFL.

The company’s ad revenue is expected to grow this year for the first time in four years, according to eMarketer.

But the X office is still teeming with drama: Yaccarino didn’t give a reason for leaving. But her announcement came just days after the AI chatbot Grok’s code was updated to be “politically incorrect,” and it immediately started posting pro-Hitler content (reportedly after Yaccarino had already decided to depart). And AI may now be a bigger focus for X than advertising, since Musk merged it with xAI in March.—MM

Trump unveils 50% tariff on Brazil over prosecution of its ex-president. In his latest round of tariff demand letters, President Trump said he plans to slap a 50% tariff on Brazilian imports as of Aug.1, partly because of its prosecution of its former President Jair Bolsonaro for an alleged coup attempt, which Trump called a “witch hunt.” The president also cited a “very unfair trade relationship” between the countries in opting for a much higher tariff than he initially announced in April. Brazil’s current president said the government would respond with reciprocity. President Trump also sent letters threatening tariffs of between 20% and 40% to at least seven more countries yesterday.

⚕️ US measles cases have reached a 33-year high. A little more than halfway into 2025, the US has reported 1,288 measles cases, marking the highest yearly total since 1992, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. An outbreak in Texas contributed to both the high number of cases and the first measles-related US deaths in a decade, though cases have been reported in 39 states. The US declared measles eliminated in 2000, but cases have been spiking as vaccination rates have waned. Of the people in the US infected this year, 92% were unvaccinated or had an unknown vaccination status.

Fed officials are divided over when to cut rates. The Federal Reserve released the minutes from its June meeting, and the good news is that the majority of its officials see interest rate cuts coming this year. But other than that, they agree about as much as feuding contestants on Love Island—the minutes show officials have differing opinions over how many times they’ll do it and when they should start, even as the president has ramped up pressure for lower rates. Although some officials remained concerned that tariffs may spur inflation, the tally shows 10 committee members expect two or more cuts, two expect just one, and seven anticipate none.—AR

In the same way your grandparents know where they were when the US landed on the moon, modern investors will always remember the day Nvidia became the first company to touch down on a $4 trillion market valuation.

The AI chipmaker briefly crossed that threshold before finishing trading yesterday with a value of $3.972 trillion. Despite being the biggest beneficiary of Big Tech’s pivot to all things AI, at the start of 2025 it seemed unlikely that Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang would win the race to a $4 trillion market cap—especially since Apple entered the year with a $3.9 trillion market cap.

• DeepSeek’s emergence in January sparked terror in Silicon Valley, as it was feared that China had found a less expensive way to create a generative AI model without relying on Nvidia’s high-end chips.
• US tariff threats and chip export controls also created doubts about the American company’s future in foreign markets.

What a year, huh? Jensen, it’s July. Nvidia shares fell as much as 37% between the start of the year and April but have rebounded nearly 74% since, thanks in part to concerns about DeepSeek’s data privacy policies and the market starting to ignore Trump’s tariff declarations. For the year, Nvidia’s stock has risen nearly 18%, and its value is up 10x since early 2023.

Looking ahead…analysts from the investment firm Loop Capital believe Nvidia’s market cap could reach $6 trillion by 2028.—DL

You yearn for the days when the Black Eyed Peas were on the radio the way Ronald McDonald yearns for a better quarter. In its latest bid to win over cash-strapped customers, McDonald’s put the beloved Snack Wrap back on menus starting today, nearly a decade after it was discontinued.

The revamped wrap will cost $2.99, more than double its $1.29 launch price in 2006, per QSR Magazine (and about a dollar more after adjusting for inflation). Many McD’s fans are so fed up with everything costing a bajillion dollars that they guessed the wrap would be $4 or more in Reddit discussions.

McD’s also added spicy McMuffins to the menu this week, in a play for Gen Z’s heart.

McBig picture: Low- and middle-income customers are the Golden Arches’ core base, and McDonald’s feels them pulling away amid a broader consumer spending slowdown. The chain reported its worst quarter since 2020 in May, citing a 3.6% dip in US sales.

Global zoom out: McDonald’s has warned of a rising, tariff-related distaste for American brands in Canada and Europe. While the chain said that hasn’t dinged its bottom line yet, Israel-related boycotts in Arab- and Muslim-majority countries contributed to its first revenue miss since the pandemic last year.—ML

Billy McFarland has come up with a new way to ask people to throw money at his Fyre Festival dreams, but at least this time it’s unlikely to end with anyone being trapped on a remote island with a sad cheese sandwich. The relentless hype machine and convicted fraudster has listed the fest and its related IP for sale on eBay.

Optimistically subscribing to the theory that all attention is good attention, the eBay listing touts the 32 billion online impressions that Fyre Festival has racked up since 2017, claiming it’s more than any other US festival brand. The listing includes the brand (minus a few carveouts), its trademarks and IP, social media accounts, and a “Caribbean festival location option.” In an Instagram post announcing the decision, McFarland showed off his gift for hyperbole by describing the auction as the “craziest thing” he’s done yet. He added that the fest’s new owner would “have an attention engine to launch festivals, do merch collabs, do insane pop-ups, run livestreams, or build a media brand.”

McFarland set the opening bid at 1 cent, but as of yesterday, the bidding was up to above $200,000. That’s still a far cry from the $26 million investors handed McFarland for the original failed music festival.—AR