X CEO Linda Yaccarino Reshuffles Inner Circle Amid Pressure From Elon Musk
Layoffs have become synonymous with X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, since its 2022 takeover by Elon Musk. The company’s latest employee to depart is top executive Joe Benarroch, who was fired by CEO Linda Yaccarino after heading X’s business operations and communications for just over a year. Benarroch’s LinkedIn profile indicates he ended his tenure at the company this month.
A former advertising executive at NBCUniversal, Benarroch was one of the most trusted members of Yaccarino’s inner circle at X and was brought on just weeks after she was made CEO in May of 2023. Charged with turning around the company’s ad revenue, her appointment followed a sway of changes brought on by Musk that spooked some advertisers and ranged from thousands of job cuts to less restrictions around content moderation. Now, Yaccarino is shaking up the company’s executive team as she faces mounting pressure from Musk to regain brand trust, cut costs and boost revenues.
Benarroch and Yaccarino previously worked together at NBCUniversal, where Yaccarino served as chairman of global advertising and partnerships. While she publicly welcomed Benarroch to X at the time with a post reading “welcome to the flock,” her stance appears to have since shifted. The former business operations head was fired by Yaccarino in part due to his failure to warn clients of a new X policy formally allowing adult content on the platform, according to the Financial Times.
His responsibilities will be temporarily taken over by Nick Pickles, whose role as X’s head of global government affairs will be expanded to include overseeing all global communications. A longtime employee of Twitter who managed to survive Musk’s job-cutting measures, Pickles has spent a decade with the company following a brief stint running as a conservative parliamentary candidate in the U.K.
Elon Musk pressures Linda Yaccarino to cut costs
Pickles joined Musk and Yaccarino in Cannes Lions earlier this month as they launched a charm offensive for advertisers. The X executives are desperately attempting to reverse an exodus of companies—including The Walt Disney Company (DIS), Lionsgate, IBM and Apple (AAPL)—that pulled back from the platform after it placed ads next to hateful and antisemitic content. Yaccarino told X staffers recently that some 65 percent of advertisers have returned to the platform since the beginning of the year, with smaller companies driving revenue.
Tasked with cutting costs by Musk, Yaccarino has also reportedly been pressured to reduce spending on travel and to cut employees from sales teams. X’s revenue measured at $1.48 billion in the first half of 2023, down nearly 40 percent from the same period in 2022, Bloomberg reported last week, citing regulatory documents. X recorded a net loss of $456 million in the first quarter of 2023, the documents showed.
And in a sign that more layoffs are likely coming, Musk recently brought in Steve Davis, the CEO of his tunneling venture, The Boring Company, to review X’s finances and performance management. Davis played a large role in Musk’s cost-cutting measures at the company shortly after his 2022 acquisition, which saw nearly 80 percent of the social media platform’s workforce laid off.
In response to requests for comment from Observer, X replied with the automated statement “busy now, please check back later.” Under Musk’s ownership, the company for several months responded to media requests with an automated poop emoji—a practice Yaccarino helped put a stop to in July 2023.