Elon Musk attends the AI Safety Summit in Bletchley, England, in 2023.Leon Neal/The Associated Press
Gus Carlson is a U.S.-based columnist for The Globe and Mail.
The departure of Linda Yaccarino as CEO of X last week is yet another squall in the perfect storm that has been gathering around Elon Musk for several months.
And like Mr. Musk’s fractured relationship with U.S. President Donald Trump, his failed attempt to downsize the federal government as de facto head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the recent nosedive in sales at Tesla TSLA-Q, and his much-maligned push to form a third U.S. political party, the maelstrom around Ms. Yaccarino’s exit is almost entirely of his own making.
Ms. Yaccarino was hired two years ago to try to repair the damage Mr. Musk’s outbursts against big X clients had done to the platform’s advertising business. Those tantrums included his now infamous expletive-laced post in 2023 targeted at advertisers he said were trying to blackmail him.
The damage, it seems, was unfixable, even for someone with credentials like Ms. Yaccarino’s. For more than a decade before joining X, she was chair of global advertising and partnerships at NBCUniversal. If anyone had the chops to mend client relationships and build the ad business, she was it.
Opinion: Musk’s new party will hurt Trump. Go, Elon!
It didn’t help Ms. Yaccarino’s cause that since Mr. Musk bought the platform for US$44-billion in 2022, there has been significant spike in hate speech posts, including homophobic, transphobic and racist slurs, exacerbated by a recent highly publicized antisemitic post linked to his AI service, Grok.
The pattern marked by Ms. Yaccarino’s failure to smooth over Mr. Musk’s ruts is becoming increasingly clear: The same personality traits that have been ingredients in Mr. Musk’s recipe for business success – mission-critical focus, unwavering self-confidence, impulsive and often petulant behaviour, and an authoritarian approach to management – have become huge liabilities outside the friendly confines of Tesla, SpaceX and X. Reports of his alleged drug use have also added context to his often erratic behaviour.
Whatever the cause – or combination of causes – it is no secret now that Mr. Musk does not play well with others.
At most any other company, this is where the board of directors or close personal advisers to leaders would – and should – step in. The situation with Ms. Yaccarino is not an isolated incident. The pattern has been forming as Mr. Musk has ventured outside his sandbox, the dots are easily connected, and the outcome isn’t just reputationally damaging – it’s material.
The biggest material ding has been at Tesla. The global pushback has been strong on Mr. Musk’s on-again, off-again bromance with Mr. Trump – and his controversial and even imperial behaviour at DOGE, including strongly worded e-mails to federal employees asking them to justify their jobs.
Protesters have burned and vandalized Tesla cars in several countries to show their displeasure with Mr. Musk’s political leanings and activity.
The result: Tesla sales have been hit hard. Globally, sales fell 13 per cent in each of the first two quarters of 2025.
To be sure, other factors have slowed Tesla’s sales, including the rise of competitors, especially from China, and a maturing of the electric vehicle market.
But the company has also been criticized for being slow to update its model line and allowing its competitive advantage to shrink and the market to catch up. Multiple delays in rolling out its new Model Y have not helped.
Many investors have blamed the company’s flat-footedness on Mr. Musk’s preoccupation with other things – namely politics – that has taken his eye off the ball at Tesla
Even Mr. Musk admitted as much. In leaving DOGE, he said he needed to give more attention to his businesses.
Mr. Musk’s closest advisers – to the extent he has them – have a difficult and perhaps impossible task to convince their leader he needs to look no further than the mirror to understand the problems his businesses face – and to rein in his behaviour.
But it’s not that easy when dealing with a personality like Mr. Musk, whose track record of business success is remarkable – and his ranking as the world’s richest man – make swaying him a real challenge.
The pressing question is this: In the wake of the exit of Ms. Yaccarino, the latest domino to fall in Mr. Musk’s empire, do any of his closest advisers have the backbone or the guts to tell the emperor he has no clothes?
And more to the point, in this case, will the emperor listen?