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

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 forces you to do,” Yaccarino added.

And she saw it almost immediately. When she arrived, Twitter was in the middle of another round of upheaval, including the retirement of its blue-bird logo and, eventually, its transformation into “X”—all with a fraction of its pre-Musk staff. Misinformation, hate speech, and bots also became growing concerns, issues that have........

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