Linda Yaccarino’s Excruciatingly Uncomfortable Interview With Julia Boorstin at the Code Conference

To the best of my recollection, I’ve never before seen an on-stage interview where the subject spent the final half of the interview pointing to her watch and repeatedly declaring that she was busy and had somewhere to go. Oof. I had to watch at 1.5× speed to get through it.

The whole interview was contentious, but Boorstin did as good a job as possible keeping it going, and asking good questions. One core tension: Musk’s week-ago declaration that he wants to make all of Twitter/X paid-subscription-only, vs. the obviousness of that being a terrible idea. Yaccarino has accepted an impossible position: pretending to run a company that she not only doesn’t actually run, but which is doing things she obviously disagrees with.

Sidenote: Yaccarino took out her iPhone and showed off her homescreen, and it’s a rather bizarre selection and arrangement of apps.

★ Friday, 29 September 2023