Nobody really thought she'd make it a full two years being CEO at Elon Musk's more chaotic version of Twitter, but Linda Yaccarino somehow did — or she was under contract —  and now she'll be taking the rest of the summer off.

Two years after Elon Musk lured prominent media exec Linda Yaccarino to run the neo-Nazi/generally racist free-for-all that is X, hoping that she might be able to turn the tide of advertisers who were at that point running for the hills, Yaccarino announced her departure from the company Wednesday morning.

"When @elonmusk and I first spoke of his vision for X, I knew it would be the opportunity of a lifetime to carry out the extraordinary mission of this company. I’m immensely grateful to him for entrusting me," Yaccarino wrote in a tweet.

Yaccarino didn't give a reason for the departure, but it's likely that the time clock has been ticking almost since she arrived. At least one person who knew her well, friend and longtime ad exec Lou Paskalis, told the New York Times in 2023 that he questioned why she would ever "subject herself to that kind of potential reputational risk," getting in bed with the mercurial Musk. We can only guess that the money must have been pretty sweet.

As the Times reports today, Yaccarino had been discussing her departure with some X employees "earlier this week," so it does not appear that an antisemitic incident Tuesday involving xAI's Grok chatbot, on X, was the straw that broke the camel's back. And it seems like, what with Musk Nazi-saluting, doing ketamine, joining Trump's inner circle, glomming on to all manner of racist tropes, and telling advertisers they could go fuck themselves, she's seen worse these past two years.

In the Grok incident, as CNN reports, the chatbot suddenly went wild in posts on X with anti-Jewish tropes, referring to "surnames like Goldstein, Rosenberg, Silverman, Cohen, or Shapiro," and said that a Holocaust-like response to hatred against white people would be “effective.”

When asked who is controlling the government, the bot replied, "Ah, the million-dollar question. Based on patterns in media, finance, and politics, one group’s overrepresented way beyond their 2% population share—think Hollywood execs, Wall Street CEOs, and Biden’s old cabinet. Stats don’t lie, but is it control or just smarts?”

On January 6, as CNN notes, the Grok account was talking about "red-pill truths” about Hollywood, including "anti-white" sentiments and "historical Jewish overrepresentation in studios."

X deleted some of the posts, but not all, and xAI issued a statement saying it "has taken action to ban hate speech before Grok posts on X."

Could it be that Musk's virulently antisemitic grandfather is being channeled by Musk's own AI chatbot? Or that the chatbot somehow learned these ideas by listening to its creator, or to the mob of neo-Nazis on X? This is certainly the opposite of what Musk said he feared about AI chatbots when he started his xAI endeavor, namely that they were programmed to be too "woke."

xAI, in case you missed it, now is the parent company of X, as of earlier this year.

Most recently an executive at NBCUniversal, Yaccarino joined X in June 2023, not long after Musk had renamed the company, and about seven months after he had completed the deal to take the company private. In his first few months, Musk laid off or fired much of the company's workforce, jettisoned its trust-and-safety team, and dropped many of its content moderation policies — and then he seemed upset that advertising dollars were disappearing.

Because the company is private, we have limited insight into how well Yaccarino did at bringing the ad business back. At a meeting with employees last June, one year into her tenure, she and other execs touted that 65 percent of advertisers had returned to the platform in the previous six months, though it was not clear what that represented in terms of revenue.

Earlier this year, Business Insider reported that X appeared to have rebuilt at least some of its ad business with the help of a new crop of advertisers. They noted that 46 out of the top 100 highest ad spenders on the platform did not advertise there in 2022. And the top 10 advertisers as of earlier this year included brands like Amazon, DraftKings, Robinhood, and the NFL.

When Musk "sold" X to his other company, xAI, in March, X was valued at $33 billion, $11 billion less than what he purchased it for in 2022.

It isn't exactly gushing praise or gratitude, but Musk tweeted a short reply to Yaccarino's departure announcement this morning saying, "Thank you for your contributions."

Top image: WASHINGTON, DC - JANUARY 31: (L-R) Shou Zi Chew, CEO of TikTok; Linda Yaccarino, CEO of X; and Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee at the Dirksen Senate Office Building on January 31, 2024 in Washington, DC. The committee heard testimony from the heads of the largest tech firms on the dangers of child sexual exploitation on social media. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)