WSJ What’s News - What Linda Yaccarino’s Departure Means for X

Episode Date: July 9, 2025

P.M. Edition for July 9. After about two years at the helm of Elon Musk’s social-media platform, Linda Yaccarino has stepped down as the CEO of X. WSJ advertising editor Suzanne Vranica discusses what that means for X, which recently merged with Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI. Plus, AI chip maker Nvidia became the world’s first company to hit a $4 trillion valuation, before paring gains this afternoon. And minutes from the Federal Reserve’s June meeting shows that officials are divided about when to resume rate cuts this year. The emerging split comes as President Trump puts pressure on Fed Chair Jerome Powell, even as the president considers candidates for his replacement. We hear from WSJ White House economic policy reporter Brian Schwartz about which candidate seems to be leading the Apprentice-style contest. Alex Ossola hosts. Sign up for the WSJ's free What's News newsletter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There's regular cold. And then there's the mountains are blue cold. Mountain cold refreshment. Coors light. The chill choice. Celebrate responsibly. Must be legal drinking age. The CEO of X steps down. What does that mean for Elon Musk's social media platform? Plus, NVIDIA becomes the world's first $4

trillion dollar company. And the Justice Department is investigating United Health Group for Medicare fraud. United engaged in these tactics in a much more aggressive way than many other major insurers. And the reality is that some of those other companies have a lot less to lose than United has got. It's Wednesday, July 9th. I'm Alex O'Sulliv for The Wall Street Journal. This is the PM edition of What's News, the top headlines and business stories that move the world today. There's an emerging split inside the Federal Reserve's rate-setting committee.

At their meeting last month, a majority of Federal Reserve officials expected they would be able to resume interest rate cuts this year, but only two of them voiced support for a rate cut as soon as this month. That's according to the minutes from last month's meeting, released today, with a customary three-week lag. Officials who believed lower rates would be appropriate later this year thought those moves could be justified by a weaker labor market or more modest and temporary inflation pressures from tariffs.

But the Minutes noted that a meaningful minority of officials thought inflation had not made enough progress towards the Fed's 2% goal to justify lowering rates. A divide among Fed officials is just one of the factors putting Fed Chair Jerome Powell in a tight spot. For more, I'm joined now by WSJ White House economic policy reporter, Brian Schwartz. Brian, Jerome Powell seems to be in a bit of a bind, right? He has a divided Fed on one side,

pressure from President Trump on the other. How's he doing with all of this? Well, it's definitely pressure on the Fed chair. There's no debating that. He's got officials in his camp, according to the latest minutes, that basically feel a mix of different things. The reality is that that's going to put a lot of pressure on Powell to determine and lead the Fed board into making a decision in potentially the coming weeks by the end

of the month. He's also dealing with something else. Is President Trump publicly taking aim at him and demanding effectively that he cuts rates. President may dispute that's what he's doing, but in reality, that's what he's doing. The other pressure point that Powell faces is the fact is, is that the president is already talking to people who should replace him. Right. Let's talk about that sort of apprentice style contest for who is going to be replacing Powell as Fed chair.

What do we know about the candidates and is one sort of edging out the other even at this relatively early stage? Well, the reporting we have now is that there's two Kevins is how we defined it. There's Kevin Warsh, former Fed Board governor, and Kevin Hassett, the president's National Economic Council director. These are two people who really have a really good shot to becoming the next Fed chair. I'm not going to say it's come down to those two, but they are in the top tier of considerations for the job. Kevin Hassett, long-time economist, long-time Trump loyalist. Kevin Warsh, he's been hanging around the net trying to get a job in the Trump administration, Fed chair, Treasury secretary, you name it. This dude's been around.

So it's kind of an interesting dynamic. They're two very different men as it pertains to their criticism of the Federal Reserve, to put it bluntly. And I think that's something to keep an eye on as this competition goes through the rounds. That was WSJ White House economic policy reporter, Brian Schwartz. Thanks so much, Brian.

Thank you. Linda Yacarino said she is stepping down as chief executive of X, capping a tumultuous run atop Elon Musk's social media company. In 2023, when Iaccarino took the helm of the social media platform, then called Twitter, she came in with decades of experience in the advertising world. Joining me now is WSJ advertising editor Suzanne Vrenica. Suzanne, what is the condition in which Linda Iaccarino is leaving X? How is its business?

Well, it's funny because Linda took over this company about two years ago and it was quite a different situation. Advertisers had balked in wide numbers, leaving the platform and pausing their ad spending just because they were afraid of all the uncertainty as Elon Musk went and acquired the company and promised to redo it, open it up to more opinions and different type of content. And they really were afraid that their ads were going to appear next to content that was controversial. There was also a lot of people that left X and that were fired, a lot of ad salespeople.

So advertisers were really nervous about who was in charge. Fast forward to now and Linder is stepping down. They're still not out of the woods and advertising spending isn't surging or anything. They're expected to finally grow ad spending this year, but they're far from close to what they made pre-Elon takeover. Does her departure represent a pivot for the company? It comes right after the merger with XAI. And there has been speculation in the marketplace about what was going to happen with the company as these two powerful companies come together. Everybody wanted to know what would happen to Linda because she's CEO of X. And I had a hard time and so did people in the industry believing that she would want to report in to anyone else except for Elon.

So there's been lots of speculation about what was going to happen here. She has done a good job of bringing new things to X like signing on more content from celebrities and shows and videos and also lots of sports content, which has made a lot of advertisers somewhat comfortable or at least more comfortable with going back. She worked on bringing new brand safety tools, which helps advertisers keep their ads away from craziness that happens on the platform or anything controversial that they don't want to be near. It does come at this really unique time because everybody's trying to figure

out what is this platform going to be. But keep in mind like X is where a lot of the ad revenue is. So it's still a really important piece to Elon Musk's overall mission to fund his biggest push into artificial intelligence, which we know now is really expensive. And every tech company as out there spending billions, if not tens of billions of dollars to do that. That was Wall Street Journal advertising editor Suzanne Vranica. That was Wall Street Journal advertising editor Suzanne Vranizza. Major U.S. indexes ended the day higher as markets took President Trump's latest tariff

moves in stride. The Nasdaq rose to a record high, closing up about 0.9 percent. The Dow climbed about half a percent, while the S&P 500 added about 0.6 percent, less than half a percent off its record high last week. A rally in NVIDIA's shares lifted its market capitalization above $4 trillion today, a world first that caps a remarkable run for the artificial intelligence chipmaker. To give you a sense of the size of that, granted market cap is a pretty different measure than GDP, but if N if Nvidia were a country,

it would rank as the fifth largest in the world, behind only the U.S., China, Germany, and Japan. That's according to the World Bank's most recent figures as of 2024. Today's milestone comes barely two years after Nvidia notched a $1 trillion closing valuation for the first time. In the end, after hitting the peak, Nvidia stock pared gains, closing shy of the $4 trillion mark. Coming up, why the Justice Department is investigating one of the biggest Medicare providers. That's after the break.

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We're exclusively reporting that the Justice Department is investigating United Health Group's Medicare billing practices, including how the giant company deployed doctors and nurses to gather diagnoses that bolstered its payments. That's according to people familiar with the matter. Christopher Weaver covers U.S. health care companies for the Journal and joins me now with more. Christopher, in May, you had reported that the Justice Department's health care fraud unit was looking into United Health Group's Medicare business. What more do we know about this probe now? The investigation has continued in recent weeks. That's included a number of interviews with medical providers, including doctors and a nurse who previously worked for United

Health Group. Those sources have told us that prosecutors asked them specifically about United's practices for recording diagnoses that they then submit to Medicare in exchange for higher payments. Basically the way Medicare Advantage works is private insurers oversee Medicare benefits for seniors and disabled people, and they get paid more if people have certain medical conditions in part

to cover those extra costs. And United has, as we've shown in a series of articles that was published last year, essentially diagnosed people with those lucrative conditions at higher rates than other insurers through a number of different kind of practices. articles that was published last year essentially diagnosed people with those lucrative conditions at higher rates than other insurers through a number of different kind of practices. What does United Health say about this investigation? When we initially broke the story in May, United denied that they'd heard from the

Department of Justice and said they stood by the integrity of their Medicare Advantage program. Now they've changed the tune a little bit. Now they're saying essentially that they don't want to engage with government agencies through the press and that they'll do it directly, that they've done well in audits in the past, and that they've engaged a new third-party process to oversee and audit their medical diagnosis recording practices. DOJ has declined to comment, as have the agencies, including the FBI and the Health Department's Office of Inspector General, that are also participating in the investigation.

I'm wondering, Christopher, whether this sends a signal to other companies that they might need to change their Medicare billing practices. There's been an enormous amount of scrutiny of these practices in the last year or so, much of that driven by the journals reporting on the topic. United engaged in these tactics in a much more aggressive way than many other major insurers. Recently, Humana, the number two company in this space, essentially changed its public position on some of these practices, including the nurse home visit. And United essentially followed suit. The reality is that some of those other companies

have a lot less to lose than United has got. That was WSJ Reporter Christopher Weaver. Thank you, Christopher. Thank you. And finally, measles cases in the U.S. have hit a 33-year high. According to data released today by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, at least 1,288 measles cases have been reported across the U.S. just over halfway through the year, surpassing the 1,274 cases reported in 2019.

According to the CDC, more than 90% of those infected with measles so far this year were unvaccinated or had an unknown vaccine status. The climbing case count is fueled largely by an outbreak that began in West Texas and spread to other states. In 2025, the vaccine-preventable disease has hospitalized hundreds and resulted in the first U.S. measles-related deaths in a decade. And that's what's news for this Wednesday afternoon.

Today's show is produced by Pierre Bienné with supervising producer Michael Kosmides. I'm Alex Osolov for The Wall Street Journal. We'll be back with a new show tomorrow morning. Thanks for listening.