He's a former Wall Street Journal editor, and son of a Ford car salesman, running X media strategy
'There is only one Elon Musk and it is my dream come true to play a role in what he’s trying to accomplish.'
John Stoll, a church deacon and father of seven children, spent most of his career as an automotive journalist in Detroit. He now heads media strategy and news partnerships at X Corp. — formerly Twitter, purchased by Elon Musk for $44 billion in 2022.
Stoll began his job on Jan. 6, 2025.
He talked with Shifting Gears about the news landscape, how life has prepared him for this role, what’s ahead for X and how he feels about working for a company owned by the richest man in the world and President Trump’s most high-profile supporter.
“There is only one Elon Musk and it is my dream come true to play a role in what he’s trying to accomplish,” Stoll said. “I love Elon and am proud to be part of what he’s doing. As a former editor in D.C., I can say I’m glad he’s getting the opportunity to make a difference there.”
Musk, who is also CEO of both Tesla and SpaceX, has dominated headlines while serving as senior adviser to President Trump while leading Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) job cuts. This controversial role in mass elimination of federal workers has led to protests against Musk. Tesla owners have sold their cars to distance themselves from his statements and actions.
Musk, a powerful force in politics and business, has 220 million followers on X.
“Elon has many different companies that he runs,” Stoll said. “He is particularly engaged in the product and engineering side of the company and very, very engaged on the project that I’m on, for sure. But I wouldn’t say we’re talking day to day. He’s got a lot of big fish to fry. So he relies on his team to do the day to day.”
Stoll reports to Linda Yaccarino, CEO of X.
“Her and I are very close,” he said. “We collaborate on a lot of different things.”
The site claims nearly 600 million monthly active users now, Stoll said.
He travels to X offices in San Francisco and New York as needed, or most recently to Miami for a marketing conference that featured Yaccarino as a keynote speaker. He often works from home in Rochester Hills, Michigan. His youngest son is just 2 years old while his eldest son heads to the University of Michigan on scholarship as a vocalist in the fall.
On the site formerly known as Twitter, @JohnStoll1977 describes himself as “X's newsman in chief.” He provides a link to the TechCrunch story: “X hires former WSJ editor and bureau chief to lead news group,” which Yaccarino announced at the annual tech extravaganza in Las Vegas known as CES (Consumer Electrics Show).
“The future of news is not legacy media,” Yaccarino said. “Legacy media news has become almost like a fan service to make sure that you’re speaking to a niche audience to make your budget. And what we want to do is make sure that we provide a great place for that journalistic curiosity to return.”
X is counting on Stoll to make this happen.
Old Detroit meets new media
John Dempsey Stoll, 47, grew up the youngest of three children with a mother who worked in the makeup industry and a father sold or serviced Ford vehicles for 40 years, half of which were spent in Rochester Hills. He retired two weeks before the pandemic broke out.
“He sold 5,000 cars,” Stoll said of his dad. “(Former Ford CEO) Alan Mulally loved him. (Ford CEO) Jim Farley loves him, too.”
Farley, when asked about John Edward Stoll late Friday, told Shifting Gears he “is an auto legend. We all stand on his shoulders. His customers LOVED him.”
Yet his youngest son never thought he’d follow his father into the auto industry.
Stoll was interested in politics, religion and sports — all elements of X.
“I didn’t think I would end up within 1,000 miles of the auto industry because my dad is a car salesman and I grew up with the auto industry in my house. So, I just kind of wanted to wall that off in my professional life,” Stoll said. “But I got an internship (at Automotive News) when I was still at Oakland University. And I found that I loved the work. It convinced me to go with journalism because I was thinking about law school. Secondly, it convinced me to sort of do what you know, which was automotive.”
So he launched his career at Automotive News and went on to work at Ward’s, Autoweek, Reuters, and the Wall Street Journal — as a reporter, editor and columnist.
“It was an end-to-end business case that very few other industries have,” Stoll said. “from the conception of a car to the death of a car, you basically touch every part of the global business world: Government relations, sustainability, supply chain, marketing, franchises, design, engineering … I probably covered the auto industry for 13 of my 20 years as a journalist. You touch everything multiple times and begin to become very fluent.”
Stoll left the Wall Street Journal during the pandemic and spent time writing on contract and doing special projects for clients including Alix Partners global consulting and Shinola.
“I talked with Elon several times about different opportunities,” Stoll said. “One of the things I started talking to him about when he bought X — (then Twitter) — was news, just my thought about news organizations.”
Since assuming his job on the anniversary of the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, Stoll focuses on media strategy while also working hand-in-hand at X with government relations, legal, speechwriting, external communications and all the things that would be traditional public relations globally.
“I’m the guy they go to,” Stoll said. “I enjoy it immensely.”
This is also the guy with a dry sense of humor who quietly added to his LinkedIn professional profile page “floor manager” at Lumon Industries. (Lumon is the workplace in the brilliant AppleTV thriller series “Severance,” where employees have had their memories surgically divided between work and personal lives.)
Stoll said, “I was curious to see the reaction.”
There wasn’t much.
(Editor’s note: Our interview was stalled because I couldn’t stop laughing.)
His listed pronouns are “he said/she said.”
He lists as his job description: “Bunging it to the noops,” which is slang for publishing the story to the news wires before the competition.
Outside work: Kids and daily swimming
As a reporter, Stoll covered everything from the the Vatican to the White House. He noted that he has interviewed four presidents — George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden. While Stoll’s 12-year-old is fascinated by Elon Musk, no one else in the family thinks much of the association.
“I guess they’re just, like, ‘Yeah, dad knows people,’” Stoll said. “It’s been a long time since I first interviewed him (Musk). So, maybe in the beginning they were a little bit more fascinated by it. I think they don’t believe that I know him. I’m just such a goofy person … When you’re a dad, you know. I just think I don’t give off the impression of being a mover and a shaker.”
Stoll keeps fit by swimming 30 laps a day or 60 pool lengths at the Life Time fitness center in Rochester Hills. The set takes 30 minutes, often at night to unplug. Stoll and his wife Kimberly have been married 22 years, and “she’s fully occupied chasing around seven kids” and a goldendoodle.
Their children include a ballerina, a gymnast, a horseback rider, a football player and a Lacrosse player and an acolyte who assists dad at church with duties such as lighting candles. The eldest son Jack, a tenor who has been in theater his whole life, is on staff at Holy Name Catholic Church in Birmingham, Michigan.
Preparing for a career at X
During his last four years at the Wall Street Journal, Stoll worked as a business columnist and hung out with corporate titans.
“I got to know their stories in depth, and how they managed problems, saw the different kind of communication techniques. Also, the healthy but often difficult tension that exists between the media and corporate America, and the media and Washington, and the media and any institution that the media is covering,” Stoll said.
“There is a tension. There’s friction. Being able to understand and empathize with both sides is really important. At end of day, we’re all good people trying to do a job. It might look different if you’re writing about a company than running a company, but if you can spend your time trying to bring the two sides closer together …,” Stoll said.
He has spent time with so many types of executives, he said, that he can relate to different perspectives and say to potential partners, “‘I understand where you’re coming from, here’s what I can do for you’ or ‘I understand why now is not the time to engage but maybe we’ll be ready to engage in the future.’”
X has always been a place where users go for news, Stoll said.
“They’re in the news flow and they want different perspectives and they want to have conversations and engagement with not just the brands but the journalists themselves, the new media, the podcasters, a lot of folks who have moved from traditional mainstream to Substack for various reasons,” he said. “So, for lack of a better term, there’s kind of a creator economy that really exists in the news business that is growing, independent, like The Free Press by Bari Weiss”— a former writer at The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.
Stoll ran through a list of established journalists writing on Substack, including Jim Acosta (formerly CNN), Chuck Todd (formerly NBC), Ron Fournier (formerly Atlantic Magazine, The National Journal, AP) and Breanna Morello (formerly Fox), Erin Molan (former SKY News Australia) and me (formerly Detroit Free Press/USA Today).
When asked about high profile users leaving X amid allegations that Musk spreads misinformation or engages in hateful content, Stoll declined to comment. “Elon’s posts speak for themselves.”
‘We’re just trying to evolve’
X brings real-time news posts that create the first draft of history as people post experiences and video of events as they unfold, and then serve as a foundation for additional fact-checking and reporting, Stoll said.
“It really is trying to deliver on the promise that we are the #1 news app in the world,” he said. “We’re very aware of that role and the amount of original posts and video that is native to the platform that is news and making sure that’s organized.”
X is working on strategies to help independents — who often also publish on Substack or Beehiiv or Rumble or YouTube — monetize their content.
“We’re just trying to evolve as we continue to be a vibrant, welcoming place to news organizations,” Stoll said. “Basically, that’s what I do. So I have relationships with the (Wall Street) Journal, Washington Post, Axios. They’re all working with us in one way, shape or form … Obviously, we’re increasing the amount of podcasters and Substackers.”
These days, X is working on the role that AI (artificial intelligence) plays in news aggregation and delivering it to users with links to more stories, Stoll said.
Elon Musk and troll detection
X has been the focus of relentless criticism by journalists and news consumers who have complained publicly about quality and trolls since Musk assumed leadership.
Stoll takes these concerns seriously, pointing to Community Notes and aggressive weeding out of bots and spam as examples of actions.
I asked: What do you say to an advertiser or reader who may feel that the content quality on X has deteriorated -- and the launch of alternatives including BlueSky.
“Virtually all of our top advertisers are back on the platform. Brand suitability scores are in the high 90s, in line or better than our competitors,” Stoll said. “We’ve vastly improved safety and performance guarantees. And we are aggressively weeding out spam on the platform. There is a reason advertisers are scaling with us.”
“eMarketer recently reported X is five percentage points higher than any of our competitors when it comes to the likelihood of an ad placement capturing attention. This is a valuable audience to tap into,” he’s said. “We have 31.8 million business decision makers on X. Nearly 600 million people use X, and two-thirds of them rely on our service as a primary source of news. That news includes my former publication, WSJ and many of its peers, as well as an emerging cohort of independents like Catherine Herridge (formerly CBS), The Free Press, and the list goes on.”
“I'd be leaving out a major innovation if I didn't recognize our Community Notes revolution -- which takes the hammer to the old way of leaving fact checking and addressing misinformation in the hands of a few and puts it in the hands of 1 million people located all over the world who are passionate about adding context, facts, and perspective on the posts. Meta, TikTok and Google have adopted this method.”
During these dynamic times of 24/7 crisis news reports, some people worry about the integrity of journalism and its ability to deliver the truth during volatile times.
I asked: What are your thoughts about the media environment? How might you respond to a concerned voter who worries about an existential threat to the Fourth Estate?
“The threat to legacy journalism is from within and the ship has sailed on its monopoly over what the public perceives as credible news. Change is hard, I get it. But, having been in the business two decades, it's hard to feel bad for an industry that has taken its audience for granted and been unwilling to acknowledge people don't view the world the same elite way they do,” Stoll said.
“Most of us are workaday Americans who want facts, balance, fairness and alternative views reflected in the news we read and watch. Whether it was the blatant dereliction of duty demonstrated by covering up a sitting president's obvious mental health problems; a stubborn refusal to evolve the business model; turning a blind eye to a public trust decline that dates back to before I was born; or its sanctimonious posture related to any factions who don't agree with the party line -- the crisis mainstream media faces is clearly self-induced,” he said.
“The good news is it has never been a better time to be a consumer of news or fan of journalism. New outlets and independent journalists of all political stripes are reaching audiences on platforms like X with increasing velocity.”
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Interesting article, amazing how much media is changing. I am not sure the change is good, but it does seem like there is no going back. Side note… I believe Musk has more than 200 million real people following him as much as I believe Trump/Bondi saved 258 million people from Fentanyl overdose.
Fascinating behind-the-scenes look at how journalism is changing. One thing I miss about “legacy” media is civility. Glib, trashy allegations like the ones raised in William Thiele’s comment here would never have seen the light of day in the glory days of print journalism. FYI, I’ve known John Stoll for decades and he is a man of genuine character. And civility.