Linda Yaccarino, the CEO of X (formerly Twitter), caught heat for her whitewashed recap of Elon Musk’s headline-making interview on Wednesday.
According to Yaccarino, the company’s billionaire owner “gave a wide ranging and candid interview” at The New York Times’ DealBook Summit.
“He also offered an apology, an explanation and an explicit point of view about our position. X is enabling an information independence that’s uncomfortable for some people,” she posted on X.
Musk did indeed offer an explicit point of view, when he told advertisers boycotting the company that they could “go fuck” themselves.
“If somebody’s going to try and blackmail me with advertising, blackmail me with money, go fuck yourself,” Musk told The New York Times’ Andrew Ross Sorkin. “Go. Fuck. Yourself.”
“Hey Bob,” he added, apparently referring to Bob Iger, the CEO of The Walt Disney Co. — one of many major brands that paused ad spending on X after Musk endorsed an antisemitic post on the platform amid the Israel-Hamas war.
Musk’s company could lose up to $75 million ($59 million) in ad revenue by the end of the year as a result, the Times recently reported.
Shortly after Musk’s remark, Sorkin pointed out: “Linda Yaccarino is right here and she’s got to sell advertising.”
Musk also suggested that he won’t be the one to blame if the business goes under.
“The whole world will know that those advertisers killed the company, and we will document it in great detail,” he said.
He insisted that he was not antisemitic, defended his previous efforts to backpedal on endorsing the antisemitic post, and apologised, saying it was one of the “most foolish” things he’d ever done on X.
Still, many social media users were stunned by Yaccarino’s framing of the interview, which was decried as “gaslighting.”
See some of the reactions below.