X CEO’s chaotic interview wins the spotlight at Code Conference

I traveled from San Francisco to this conference for the headliner: X (formerly Twitter) CEO Linda Yaccarino. I was keen to see her in person since it has been almost one year since Elon Musk took control of Twitter. I’ll be blunt: Yaccarino conducted one of the worst live interviews many of us had ever seen—and you can judge for yourself!

While some might say that the CEO of a massive social media platform should be able to roll with the punches (and I agree), there’s some additional context that might explain this utter and complete train wreck:

An hour before Yaccarino was set to take the stage on Wednesday, the former Twitter head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth, made a surprise appearance with the founder of the conference, Kara Swisher. Roth left Twitter late last year, after a tweet by Musk falsely accused him of pedophilia, and has been open about the experiences that ensued. As he explained onstage, he’s received an avalanche of death threats, which led him to flee his home out of concern for his safety.

Here’s the thing: Roth’s talk was familiar if you have followed his work. He’s spoken about his experience working at Twitter on This American Life and in op-eds for the New York Times, so a lot of his interview was well-worn. But aside from discussing the end of his employment at Twitter (and subsequent harassment), Roth also talked about advertising at Twitter and questioned the transparency around the platform’s hate speech data.

It’s impossible to determine whether her performance would have been better had Roth not been added to the lineup at least eight hours before her interview (for instance, she employed a similar “word salad,” as a friend of mine put it, during an interview with CNBC last month). But she seemed rattled and agitated as she took the stage. Still, I don’t think anyone has to reiterate that the CEO of X should be able to handle a shake-up and some surprise programming.

According to Swisher and another source familiar with the matter, Yaccarino had all day to prepare for her appearance—with a text being sent to her at roughly 7 a.m. informing her of Roth’s presence. By 9:30 a.m., Roth and Swisher were told that the timing of the interview was changed, per a request by the X team, in order to put some space between the two panels. Swisher tweeted that Yaccarino decided to go onstage after Yoel in order to get “the last word.”

“All this aside, Yoel was extraordinarily respectful to Linda, who should have been able to answer basic questions about X put to her fairly and also respectfully by Julia,” Swisher wrote in a text to me.

Still, this surprise appearance caused quite a bit of madness backstage. One source familiar with the matter told me CNBC’s Julia Boorstin, who was tapped to interview Yaccarino, had a terse phone call with Yaccarino and Vox Media CEO Jim Bankoff (requiring everyone to clear the greenroom). The source added that Yaccarino was surprised and very upset by the shake-up; there were very real concerns Yaccarino might not go onstage at all. 

Yaccarino, accompanied by armed guards, also refused to go onstage with an audience Q&A, causing the removal of audience mics, sources explained.

I was sitting outside attempting to write a draft on Roth’s panel when someone rushed to my table to tell me what was happening in the greenroom just before Yaccarino’s panel, a chaotic story many ended up hearing countless times throughout the night.

Kudos to the Vox Media team and Boorstin, who were able to cobble it together quickly. People in Code-branded shirts ushered the audience back in for the last panel. We grabbed our seats and whispers abounded when people began noticing the missing microphones.

Once Yaccarino did take the stage, Boorstin said, “As many of you saw [Roth] was a very late addition to the schedule, a surprise both to me and Linda.” Yaccarino responded, “I think many people in this room were not fully prepared for me to still come out on the stage.” You can say that again, Linda!

I cannot stress enough how wildly uncomfortable the conversation that ensued was. I urge you to watch the video if you think I’m exaggerating. Rather than acting as a “very senior executive” (to use the label she gave herself onstage), Yaccarino seemed completely preoccupied by Roth’s comments, not willing to let the topic drop for even a minute. Boorstin attempted to keep Yaccarino on track and signaled that they could move on from the topic of Roth (a performance that earned Boorstin a standing ovation), but like a dog with a bone, Yaccarino was relentless, and you could feel the crowd turning against her very quickly.

Yaccarino was also on the offensive when it came to questions about Musk. When asked more about how she could be considered a CEO when the product teams at X don’t report to her, she was combative, and in part of her answer she said, “Who wouldn’t want Elon Musk sitting by their side running product?” Multiple people raised their hands, and the room burst into stifled laughter.

When pressed by Boorstin, Yaccarino avoided giving specific details on daily active users; she and Musk typically focus on monthly active users, which she says have surged to over 540 million. For DAU, Yaccarino gives a range of 200 million to 250 million, and then instead of citing hard-core numbers she opted for “a more personal, specific number” regarding the number of communities on Twitter.

Boorstin also asked about how going to a full subscription model on X will affect revenue, something Musk has long teased as a possibility. Yaccarino replied, “Did he say that or did he say he’s thinking about it?”

After Yaccarino’s incredibly awkward and tense panel (she even excused herself from the stage), I spent the rest of the conference asking this question: What did Roth say or do that threw her off track that badly? His interview didn’t offer anything particularly new, and while Yaccarino might not be a seasoned CEO, she’s certainly not inexperienced at tough conversations.

One person familiar with Yaccarino told me plainly it was because “she’s not a CEO, she’s an ad person.” Another person familiar with her said that “up until three months ago [she] lived in a very predictable world where she’s in control.”

“It’s not in a reactive mode, like, that’s just not the business that she’s been in,” the source told me. “She’s literally been the most powerful person in the advertising business until June.”

I wrote a profile back in May where I talked to former colleagues of hers, one of whom said that she’ll have to adjust from “primetime streaming pristine content” to “gutter-brawling content.” I think it’s fair to say that this has clearly been a hard adjustment for Yaccarino, and that much was more than apparent onstage. 

Even the mightiest may find themselves caught off guard, like when Mark Zuckerberg infamously sweat through his hoodie at the predecessor to this very conference. It’s yet to be seen, however, if Yaccarino has what it takes to rebound from this performance. She’s set to make a return to Laguna Niguel in a few weeks for a speaking engagement at a Wall Street Journal conference, but as fellow attendees whispered among themselves, it’s safe to assume that this encore won’t provide the same dramatic fireworks.

Kylie Robison

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Today’s edition was curated by David Meyer.

NEWSWORTHY

Tesla racism suit. Tesla is being sued by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission over its alleged tolerance of its Black employees being racially harassed. As TechCrunch reports, this is far from the first suit over racial bias at Tesla. It says Tesla not only “failed and refused” to address widespread racially offensive conduct but fired Black employees who spoke up.

AI transparency. The British government is trying to get the likes of OpenAI and DeepMind to give its officials access to the inner workings of their AI models, according to the Financial Times. We’re talking about things like model weights—parameters that determine the influence of inputs as they pass through the layers of a neural network, and ultimately the model’s behavior. AI companies do not currently reveal this secret sauce to any government and are reportedly nervous about exposing proprietary information or increasing security threats to their products.

Nvidia raid in France. French antitrust investigators raided Nvidia’s offices this week. It’s not entirely clear why, but the Wall Street Journal reports France has an ongoing inquiry into the cloud sector. AI promises fresh growth for cloud computing, with Nvidia’s graphics processors being ubiquitous workhorses. (P.S.—French wireless-frequency authorities have approved Apple’s software update to the iPhone 12, which was designed to bring the device’s radiation levels within the official threshold. If Apple now rolls it out to all iPhone 12 users in France, that’s the end of the matter.)

ON OUR FEED

“If things begin to look bleak—maybe he feels that now—if that were to happen and if he had the opportunity, maybe the time would come that he would seek to flee.”

—District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan disagrees with the assertion by Sam Bankman-Fried’s lawyers that the former FTX CEO can be trusted to be released ahead of his fraud trial.

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Silicon Valley pioneer Vinod Khosla says VCs need to make riskier climate tech investments, by Rachyl Jones

NSA starts AI security center with eye on China and Russia as general warns U.S. lead ‘should not be taken for granted,’ by the Associated Press

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BEFORE YOU GO

Netflix mails last DVDs. Netflix, which began a quarter of a century ago as a DVD-rental-by-mail service, is finally calling time on that aspect of its business. Today is the last day its five remaining distribution centers will send out physical discs—and the recipients may keep them.

As former Netflix CEO Marc Randolph noted, this is a bittersweet moment: “We knew this day was coming, but the miraculous thing is that it didn’t come 15 years ago…From day one, we knew that DVDs would go away, that this was transitory step. And the DVD service did that job miraculously well. It was like an unsung booster rocket that got Netflix into orbit and then dropped back to earth after 25 years. That’s pretty impressive.”