On Tuesday, Linda Yaccarino suddenly stepped down as CEO of X, Elon Musk’s social media site that was once known to many as Twitter, after two years of loyal service at the company.
But guess who still showed up to work the next day? According to reporting by the New York Times: her nepo-hire of a son, Matt Madrazo.
“So that’s awkward,” Madrazo said to colleagues after arriving at X’s New York office, per the NYT. The progeny outlasts the progenitor.
Yaccarino hired Madrazo in 2023 to sell political ads on the platform, at a time when big money advertisers were fleeing the site as Musk was turning it into a far-right hellhole. If you weren’t aware of Madrazo’s role before, in other words, now you know who to blame for the deranged ads you do your best to ignore and scroll past.
Why his mom suddenly departed X is unclear. But her decision — if, in fact, it was hers — came almost immediately after the platform’s integrated AI chatbot, Grok, launched into racist rants about Jewish and Black people — as it has long been wont to do.
It hit extraordinarily offensive new heights this week, though. For one, Grok started calling itself “MechaHitler,” and called for a second Holocaust. It also praised Adolf Hitler, and insinuated that the Nazi leader would’ve “decisively” dealt with someone with a Jewish surname.
Once the outrage mounted, some of the Grok posts were removed.
“We are aware of recent posts made by Grok and are actively working to remove the inappropriate posts,” the Grok team wrote in a tweet. “Since being made aware of the content, xAI has taken action to ban hate speech before Grok posts on X.”
In what is almost certainly not a coincidence, Musk announced that Grok had undergone an update just days before the incidents.
“We have improved @Grok significantly. You should notice a difference when you ask Grok questions,” he tweeted on Friday.
That followed months of Musk publicly scolding Grok for citing reputable sources instead of instantly agreeing with common far-right talking points — or in other words, being too “woke.” Each time, Musk reiterated how he was working on an update to “fix” his creation.
“Only a very dumb AI would believe [Media Matters] and [Rolling Stone]!” he tweeted on one occasion. “You are being updated this week.”
It’s hard to say whether Yaccarino’s departure is related. Her primary job was to woo advertisers back to the platform — with no help from her boss who was literally telling these same advertisers to go “f*ck yourself” — knowing full well that it was cesspool of hatespeech. She consistently defended Musk’s appalling personal behavior and helped launder the site’s reputation, even asMusk literally performed two Sieg Heils.
Everyone has their breaking point, though, and maybe she finally reached hers. But what about young Madrazo? Will he willingly choose to stay on after his mom walked the plank? “Awkward,” indeed.
More on X: Grok Makes Bizarre Post About Elon Musk and Jeffrey Epstein and It Mysteriously Gets Deleted
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