The moment that most made Linda Yaccarino doubt that she belonged in her role as X CEOand ultimately helped her shed the nagging worryoccurred at January Senate hearings into child exploitation on social media platforms.

It was one of the most pivotal moments not just of last year but of my entire life, Yaccarino said Monday in a conversation with Shelley Zalis, founder and CEO of the Female Quotient, at this weeks Cannes Lions, the advertising worlds version of the Oscars.

Going into the hearings, Yaccarino said, she had only been at the company six months and therefore lacked what she called the depth of knowledge and tenure enjoyed by the four male counterparts from the likes of Meta and TikTok sitting beside her on the panel.

Im not an engineer, Im not a founder, and my natural kind of career-long upbringing was not in tech and social media, she said, describing a feeling of not belonging commonly known as Imposter Syndrome. And by the way, [I was] the only woman.

Yaccarino said she had been keen to share the work undertaken by X on her watch to better protect children on the platform, but worried she would be able to do so with confidence.

Ultimately, she says, what helped her do so was the preparation process, the data she had to back up her assertions, and the encouragement and support she received from the company.

That fueled me and fueled my confidence to be successful that day, said Yaccarino, who has regularly faced criticism shes apuppet CEOor really a glorified COO put in place to implement Musks ordersor has been set up by Musk totake the fallshould the company fail.

When asked by Zalis to highlight an example or two of the relationship she enjoys with Musk, Yaccarino cited the day the entrepreneur announced in May that he had hired a female CEO to run Twitter.

I think that was the best message I ever got of all time, she added.

At the time, Yaccarino and Musk had been discussing his vision of moving away from Twitter as a 140-character messaging service. Instead, it would pivot toward avideo-first platformofferingaudio callsandsoononline payments, allunder the banner of championingfree speech.

The scope of our ambition and the pace of the innovation at the company is like nothing I can describe to any of you. Its exhilarating, slightly exhausting, but it is an opportunity of a lifetime to watch it happening, said Yaccarino.

Counter to what many critics expected and indeed Musks own worst fears, X hasnot gone bankruptsince Musk wasforcedunder penalty of court tohonor in fullhis contract to buy Twitter for $44 billion.

Its survived a period when itreportedly refused to paycountlessbills, witnessed the proliferation ofimposter accounts,and eliminated the majority of its headcount (including even themost dedicated).

Yaccarino even managed to steer the company ahead after Musk told former advertisers like Disney to go f*** yourself, adding on Monday that in retrospect shed have taken the job again in a heartbeat.

But the transition into a more lucrative video-first platform has been slow despite every attempt by Musk to stream his Diablo IV video gaming live to followers.

When Musk urged popular Twitch streamers to switch to X by attacking his Amazon-owned rival for its failure to police its content, he waspromptly ridiculedover his own platformsinfestation of bots.

Days later, X announced its own change of courseand reworded its terms of service to specifically permit sharing content not safe for work. It subsequentlyeliminated any ability to see what posts users like.

In other words, Yaccarino and her team still have a lot of work to do if X is indeed to become theeverything app. Right now users only spend some 35 minutes a day on the platform, according to Yaccarino. While she believes that will only go up going forward once payments are rolled out starting in the U.S. market, that number is still far from the declared goal of users spending, in her words, most of their lives on the platform.

But her experience testifying alongside four peers on the issue of policing child grooming and sexual exploitation on social media helped boost her confidence to succeed in this task as well.Interviewer Zalis of the Female Quotient was quick to agree: If you actually watch the hearing, it was Linda and five [sic] dudesand she smoked em.

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Linda Yaccarino shares her biggest moment of imposter syndrome from her last year running Elon Musk's X - Fortune