Linda Yaccarino spent 2 years as Elon Musk’s X CEO. She says his ‘insatiable sense of urgency’ is the secret to his trillionaire success
Source: Fortune ·
As CEO of X, Linda Yaccarino saw firsthand what has fueled Elon Musk’s path to a trillionaire: treating every deadline like it’s right now.
From the source
Elon Musk’s net worth once again topped the $1 trillion mark this week—and few people have had a closer look at the forces behind his success than his former deputy Linda Yaccarino. The 30-year media veteran was tapped as CEO of then-Twitter in 2023, stepping in as Musk was remaking the social platform from the ground up, and she got a firsthand look at the philosophy driving his companies, from Tesla to SpaceX: Move fast, rethink everything, and don’t wait for tomorrow. “The reason his companies are singular in what they deliver is because of the insatiable sense of urgency. There’s not a deadline for a project or to ship something, a product—it’s now,” Yaccarino told Fortune. That mindset, she said, changes how you approach virtually any challenge. Rather than simply working toward a deadline, it forces you to strip a project down to its most essential pieces and figure out what actually needs to happen to succeed. “A lot of people talk about first principles, but that’s what it…