X CEO is already doing damage control on Elon Musk's GTA 6 post

With fans left buzzing by the release of the first official trailer for Grand Theft Auto VI, X/Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino has been left apparently performing some damage control after Elon Musk’s comments about the game.

The GTA 6 trailer is on its way to breaking YouTube viewing records after the 90-second video was viewed over 70 million views just hours after release.

Rockstar Games, the company behind the fan-favourite franchise, was forced to release the trailer earlier than planned as its marketing plans were scuppered after the trailer was leaked on X/Twitter.

Despite GTA 6 being the top trending topic in several countries around the world, Twitter owner and tech billionaire Musk took the opportunity to dump on the game, saying he never played it because he “didn’t like doing crime”.

The tweet seemed to have Twitter CEO Yaccarino doing damage control after she urged Rockstar Games to release the trailer directly onto X/Twitter, as opposed to their own YouTube channel.

Yaccarino wrote: “.@RockstarGames — gaming is one of our most popular topics. Drop that trailer here — give the people on @X what they want!!”

She posted screenshots of viewing figures comparing the number of views of Rockstar Games’ X/Twitter post with the YouTube link with the number of views the YouTube video had received, with the former appearing to have around 30 million more views.

In the comments, the account for the gaming app Opera GX pointed out: “The trailer they have been working on for years got leaked on this platform, Linda.”

Others pointed out that the metrics and how the two platforms measure them aren’t the same.

Someone explained: “X post views represent impressions, indicating the number of times the post has appeared in the scrolling timeline. This differs from the count of how many times a video has been viewed or played after a user lands on the page.”

Another argued: “A Twitter view does not equal a YouTube view.”

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