Company-wide memo from nominal X Corp CEO Linda Yaccarino, sent this morning:

Hi team,

What a momentous weekend.

Everyone said to me, “Linda, what are you thinking? You don’t want to work for that guy. He’s crazy and impulsive. You’ve got a great job at NBC. You’ve got a great future ahead of you. If you take this job it’ll tank your career and your name will be a punchline.” Did I listen to them?

As I said yesterday, it’s extremely rare, whether it’s in life or in business, that you have the opportunity to make another big impression. That’s what we’re experiencing together, in real time. Take a moment to put it all into perspective.

It’s OK to day-drink. I am.

17 years ago, Twitter made a lasting imprint on the world. The platform changed the speed at which people accessed information. It created a new dynamic for how people communicated, debated, and responded to things happening in the world. Twitter introduced a new way for people, public figures, and brands to build long lasting relationships. In one way or another, everyone here is a driving force in that change. But equally all our users and partners constantly challenged us to dream bigger, to innovate faster, and to fulfill our great potential.

Twitter was a simple concept with profound impact.

With X we will go even further to transform the global town square — and impress the world all over again.

It’s not just you. I have no idea what’s going on either.

Our company uniquely has the drive to make this possible.

Fucking Elon.

Many companies say they want to move fast — but we enjoy moving at the speed of light, and when we do, that’s X.

According to Einstein’s theory of special relativity, as an object approaches the speed of light, the object’s mass becomes infinite and so too does the energy required to move it. But this holds true, in degree, for all objects in motion, and a mind-bending aspect of special relativity is that the faster an object is moving, the more slowly it experiences time. If you were able to move at the speed of light, time wouldn’t pass at all. It would be like being damned for eternity, forever caught in the current moment, while the world moves on for everyone else.

I think about this.

At our core, we have an inventor mindset — constantly learning, testing out new approaches, changing to get it right and ultimately succeeding.

We are hemorrhaging cash and our advertisers are still fleeing.

With X, we serve our entire community of users and customers by working tirelessly to preserve free expression and choice, create limitless interactivity, and create a marketplace that enables the economic success of all its participants.

I used to run all advertising for NBCUniversal. Now I’m running an $8/month multi-level marketing scheme where the only users who’ve signed up are men who own a collection of MAGA hats.

The best news is we’re well underway.

There is no hope.

Everyone should be proud of the pace of innovation over the last nine months — from long form content, to creator monetization, and tremendous advancements in brand safety protections.

Have you seen the ads we’re running these days? Last week we were filling everyone’s timeline with ads for discount boner pill chewing gum, the punchline of which ads is that you’ll bang your lady so hard she’ll need the aid of a walker afterward. That’s a video we promoted to everyone. This week it’s anime for foot fetishists. That’s what we put in everyone’s feed, every three tweets. Or X’s, or whatever we’re now calling them. I used to book hundred-million-dollar Olympic sponsorship deals with companies like Coca-Cola and Proctor & Gamble. (Thank god for Apple.)

Our usage is at an all time high

Our owner is high as a kite.

and we’ll continue to delight our entire community with new experiences in audio, video, messaging, payments, banking — creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities.

Our focus group testing suggests that while interest in trusting this platform — which, let’s face it, is not exactly known for its reliability — for banking, of all things, is, as you’d expect, pretty low overall, it’s surprisingly high amongst people who know who Catturd is.

Please don’t take this moment for granted.

Please quit. Get out. I beg you. Leave while you can put on your resume that you worked for “Twitter”.

You’re writing history, and there’s no limit to our transformation.

As if this rebranding disaster isn’t enough, our infrastructure is crumbling. Facebook took Threads from 0 to 100 million users in under a week, without a hitch, at the same time we imposed comical rate limits on usage. I mean can you even believe that shit? I still can’t. I said to him, “Elon, we are an ad-based business. Our revenue is directly commensurate to usage. This is like running a casino and turning the slot machines off to save on the electricity bill. It makes no sense.” And Elon was like “Bots!”

And everyone, is invited to build X with us.

I think I, saw on a TV show once that a hostage was able, to signal to authorities the need for help without alerting, their captors by placing commas randomly in their sentences.

Elon and I will be working across every team and partner to bring X to the world. That includes keeping our entire community up to date, ensuring that we all have the information we need to move forward.

I found out about this name change when you did, at midnight on Saturday, and I have no idea what that fucker is going to do next or when he’s going to do it. You know this. You know that I know that you know this. But I’m going to persist with the charade that these decisions are being made by a team that I’m a leader of, because to do otherwise would be even more humiliating.

Now, let’s go make that next big impression on the world, together.

Linda

I’m so sorry.

Linda

This morning, a friend noted a discrepancy between two recent headlines at The Mac Observer:

• March 5: “Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer to Retire, Luca Maestri to Take Over”
• May 7: “PR Queen Katie Cotton Leaving Apple”

I tweeted the two headlines and corresponding URLs, with a single word of commentary: “Hmm”. I said no more partly because I was near the 140-character limit, and partly to see what the reaction would be. Some got it, but many repliers missed my point, mistakenly thinking it was related to an exodus of executives from the company.¹

My point was to draw attention to the disparate job descriptions: “Apple CFO” vs. “PR Queen”.

Julia Julie Richert pointed to a similar discrepancy — two Philip Elmer-DeWitt headlines on his weblog at CNN/Fortune/Money:

• January 2012 (upon the hiring of John Browett to replace Ron Johnson): “A New Boss at the Apple Store”
• May 2014: “Angela Ahrendts’ Big First Week as Queen of Apple Retail”

Maybe you can find an article in which Peter Oppenheimer is described as Apple’s “finance king”, but I can’t. It’s true that Oppenheimer’s official title (“CFO”) aptly describes his position in a way that Cotton’s (“vice president of worldwide corporate communication”) does not. “Queen”, however, is the wrong way to shorthand it. Boss, chief, head, leader — honcho perhaps, if you want to be casual — any of these words can be used to convey authority. Queen, though, emphasizes something else: gender. It carries other connotations, none of them flattering: queens are arrogant, distant, prissy, entitled, superior; they become queens by birthright or marriage, not through merit.²

[UPDATE: Dan Benjamin points out that Elmer-DeWitt has used “king” in headlines, albeit not in the context of a substitute for a job title. Queen in the above cited examples is being used in lieu of gender-neutral words such as boss or chief.]

Unintentional sexism is sexism nonetheless. There’s almost never a good reason to use a different word to describe a woman’s job than the words you’d choose if the position were held by a man.