Top Impressions from Julia Boorstin’s full interview with @X’s CEO Linda Yaccarino

Here are the top Impressions from Julia Boorstin’s full interview with @X’s CEO Linda Yaccarino at the #Code2023 conference.

Linda was visibly angry, perhaps because the conference had added an interview with Joel Roth, Twitter’s former head of the trust and safety team, right before her own interview without notice, who in his interview criticized X.

She was also defensive for most of the interview. For instance, when Julia asked how many DAUs X now had (vs. the 237M DAUs when @elonmusk bought the company), she was evasive and cited other, presumably more favorable metrics instead.

She did, however, say that she expects X to become profitable in early 2024, and that 90% of Twitter’s former top 100 advertisers had returned.

She was clearly unhappy with Elon going over her head; for instance, publicly musing if X should introduce subscription fees for all users to fight bots. Had Elon discussed this with her before? She replied, “We are talking about everything!” But her body language seemed to tell a different tale.

In another example, Julia confronted her with the fact that even though Linda had had a conciliatory meeting with the @ADL’s leader Jonathan Greenblatt, the next day, Elon publicly pondered if X should file a defamation lawsuit against the ADL. (The ADL had called on advertisers to stay off X because, allegedly, X had done too little to fight antisemitism on the platform.) Did she mind that Elon had taken that step? Again, she avoided answering, and instead voiced disappointment that the ADL continued to try to keep advertisers off X instead of acknowledging the progress X had made.

@JBoorstin @lindayaX @JGreenblattADL

https://youtu.be/hYymRU-bfpQ?si=UW9bClv9vVziEU1J via @YouTube