– X-it. During Linda Yaccarino’s two-year tenure as CEO of X, one question dogged her leadership: how much power did she actually have?

While Yaccarino led the social media platform as CEO, often it seemed the real decision-making came down to owner Elon Musk, who bought what was then Twitter for $44 billion in 2022. Musk was an incredibly active presence on the platform, interacting with users, shifting the algorithm in favor of his content, and giving a sometimes minute-by-minute view into his own opinions about the platform (and American politics). He always made it clear that X was, more than anything else, his.

One analyst, Forrester research director Mike Proulx, put it this way: “It was clear from the start that she was being set up to fail by a limited scope as the company’s chief executive…[In reality, Musk] “is and always has been at the helm of X. And that made Linda X’s CEO in title only, which is a very tough position to be in, especially for someone of Linda’s talents.”

Yaccarino joined in 2023 after a career leading NBCUniversal’s ads business. At the time, Twitter’s ad business was in trouble—and Tesla shareholders worried Musk was too distracted from his supposed main gig, running the automaker. She’s left X’s ads business in a better place than she found it—up 62% year over year as spooked advertisers have slowly returned to the platform, per TechCrunch, although challenges remain.

She said in her announcement (on X, of course) that she’s “immensely grateful to [Musk] for entrusting me with the responsibility of protecting free speech, turning the company around, and transforming X into the Everything App.” She also noted that X has “restored advertiser confidence.”

But ultimately, even as Musk explored his other interests—namely, getting Donald Trump elected president—X was always going to come back to him. The controversial businessman and world’s richest person is hardly known to be hands-off. Earlier this year, Musk demonstrated how intertwined his businesses are; he sold X to xAI, his artificial intelligence startup (which created X’s chatbot Grok). Fifteen senior execs have left X in the past year, my colleague Lila MacLellan reports for Fortune. And Yaccarino acknowledged in her own announcement that “the best is yet to come as X enters a new chapter with xAI.”

Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com

The Most Powerful Women Daily newsletter is Fortune’s daily briefing for and about the women leading the business world. Today’s edition was curated by Sara Braun. Subscribe here.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

© Benjamin Girette—Bloomberg/Getty Images

– Sweet and sour. The Fortune 500 will soon be down one female CEO after Hershey’s announced yesterday that longtime chief Michele Buck will hand over the reins of the $11.2 billion-in-revenue chocolate-maker Aug. 18.

Buck had already announced her plans to retire, but moved up the timeline by almost a year. Her successor is Kirk Tanner, a PepsiCo alum-turned-CEO of Wendy’s who led the fast food chain’s collabs with brands from Spongebob to Takis.

When the 2025 Fortune 500 was published a month ago, 55 companies on the list were led by female CEOs. Buck was one of the longer-tenured among that group; she’d led Hershey since 2017. She well outlasted the average tenure of a female Fortune 500 chief, which has hovered around four years for a decade. (For men, it’s seven—which Buck also beat.)

But Buck has said, per the Wall Street Journal, that she stayed in the CEO job for longer than she planned, after being asked by her board. In her recent months on the job, she dealt with a tough environment for the candy-makers, from high cocoa prices to slowed consumer spending to “Make America Healthy Again”‘s criticism of artificial dyes and processed foods.

On the Fortune 500, women are still running more than 10% of companies, if not quite the 11% that stat hit in June. The 71-year-old ranking of America’s largest companies first crossed the 10% mark for female CEOs in 2023. One CEO’s retirement is hardly a problem for female CEOs writ large, but when dealing with numbers this small, every hire or exit matters. Hershey conducted a search for Buck’s replacement and went with an external candidate. That’s where men seem to have an advantage—between 2024 and 2025 no female executives were hired into Fortune 500 CEO jobs, only promoted to them from within.

Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com

The Most Powerful Women Daily newsletter is Fortune’s daily briefing for and about the women leading the business world. Today’s edition was curated by Sara Braun. Subscribe here.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

© Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg—Getty Images

– In the driver’s seat. In the 117-year history of the mass-produced automobile, there’s never been a car company both founded and led by a woman. Men’s names—Ford, Ferrari, Chrysler—became the iconic brands that dominate the category.

Out on Long Island, Kristie D’Ambrosio-Correll is building the first automotive business both founded and led by a female CEO. (Of course, it’s not the first to be led by a female CEO, with GM chief Mary Barra an icon of the auto industry.) D’Ambrosio-Correll, 37, is the founder of Dacora, an ultra-luxury electric vehicle that will sell for between $500,000 and $650,000 starting in 2028. And it’s named for her—a shortened version of the last name she and her husband, Dacora’s CTO Eric D’Ambrosio-Correll, share.

In person, the car is striking. So far, there’s one prototype which D’Ambrosio-Correll recently had on display parked outside the Waverly Inn in Manhattan. It’s 20 feet long, and D’Ambrosio-Correll describes the vision as “America’s Rolls Royce.” She grew up fascinated by cars and remembers asking her father what the American ultra-luxury automobile was—and being disappointed there wasn’t an equivalent. She pursued a path as a computer and electrical engineer—and was the CTO of Mirror, the at-home fitness company that sold to Lululemon for $500 million in 2020. The experience taught her about building a high-value product that’s integrated into a customer’s physical, everyday world.

Dacora is catering to an ultra-wealthy clientele, one that may not even be driving (or be driven in) an equivalent car today. The customer is often someone who has built or sold a company, whose work blends fully into their life, D’Ambrosio-Correll says. The customer is eager for privacy and disconnection—the car has no screens inside, beyond a disappearing navigation platform. The car is electric partly because that’s the quietest engine. The buyer doesn’t want voice control or other modern features. “They’re not happy with what’s on the market,” she says. “They’ve gone downmarket.”

Dacora is not building its own power train, and is building the model on top of an existing EV power base. “It’s kind of an old school model that used to be done back in the ’20s and ’30s,” D’Ambrosio-Correll explains. That helps this not to be a “money pit” of an endeavor, she says. The company also won’t hold inventory, and will build vehicles commissioned for clients at a factory/atelier in Hudson, New York. The CEO expects to turn a profit in Dacora’s second year of production and expand to global markets—especially the Middle East and Europe—after that.

Courtesy of Dacora

While the ultra-luxury automotive market may seem to be dominated by men, D’Ambrosio-Correll is eager to build for a female clientele too. At 4-foot-9, she’s well aware of the challenges that arise when cars are not designed for women. “Not only are cars designed by companies that are led by men, they’re marketed as if women only care about the safety of their families—which, of course we do, but that’s not the only thing we care about,” she says.

D’Ambrosio-Correll specifically sought out female investors to back her vision. Anu Duggal of Female Founders Fund invested when the idea was just a drawing on a sheet of paper, as one of her first forays into big-tech hardware. Jesse Draper’s Halogen Ventures is a backer, too; many waitlisted clientele are angel investors.

D’Ambrosio-Correll hopes that Dacora lasts as long as the world’s most iconic auto brands. “Hopefully, this will be our family legacy for a long time,” she says.

Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com

The Most Powerful Women Daily newsletter is Fortune’s daily briefing for and about the women leading the business world. Today’s edition was curated by Sara Braun. Subscribe here.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

© Courtesy of Dacora

– Spice strategy. The best journalism often comes from topics that writers are personally passionate about—an obsession they have, or a question they can’t stop thinking about. That’s what happened for my colleague Jessica Mathews and her new Fortune story about Diaspora Co.

The 8-year-old startup now pulling in “mid-millions” per year sells high-quality spices sourced from 140 farms. Founder Sana Javeri Kadri started with turmeric, after noting its growing popularity in the U.S., and has expanded to black pepper, cardamom, spice blends, and more. Among foodies and those who care about high-quality ingredients, the brand is incredibly popular.

Courtesy of Diaspora Co.

Jessica reached out to Javeri Kadri because she wanted to know, essentially, why and how her spices taste so good. The founder told her that most spices are indigenous to South Asia, and taste different when grown there—even compared to the same seeds, extracted and planted elsewhere.

Diaspora Co. was bootstrapped for five years, before Javeri Kadri raised a $1 million pre-seed round and then a 2024 $1.5 million seed round from a whopping 75 angel investors, from Meena Harris to the founder of Salt & Straw ice cream—a strategy that helped her set aside 35% of the company’s equity for farmers and employees.

“With the grocery venture capital world right now, you’re often selling an unprofitable product at scale and hoping that it’ll eventually become profitable,” she told Jessica. “I can’t do that for my farm partners—that’s a very short-term outlook. I want their kids to inherit their family business, and the family business to be thriving. I want our farmers to be happy,” she says.

Read the full story here.

Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com

The Most Powerful Women Daily newsletter is Fortune’s daily briefing for and about the women leading the business world. Today’s edition was curated by Sara Braun. Subscribe here.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

© Courtesy of Diaspora Co.