Elon Musk has declared that Linda Yaccarino, a senior executive with strong ties to the advertising sector, will be the new CEO of Twitter, or X Corp. as it is now known.
“I am excited to welcome Linda Yaccarino as the new CEO of Twitter!” Musk wrote in a Friday tweet. He added that Yaccarino “will focus primarily on business operations, while I focus on product design & new technology.”
According to the company bio, Yaccarino has been employed by NBCUniversal for almost 12 years, and her team has since 2011 generated more than USD 100 billion in ad sales. Yaccarino previously held the positions of president of cable entertainment and digital advertising sales as well as chair for advertising and client partnerships at NBC, according to LinkedIn. Yaccarino spent almost two decades working for Turner, a major global entertainment company, before joining NBC.
Yaccarino interviewed Musk on a Miami stage last month in front of hundreds of advertisers.
Musk and Twitter must entice advertisers after a large number left Twitter in the early months of his takeover, fearing damage to their brands in the ensuing chaos. Musk claimed that advertisers had returned in late April, but he gave no further information.
According to Mark DiMassimo, founder and creative director of the ad agency DiGo, Yaccarino could help Twitter regain the trust of advertisers. He pointed out that Yaccarino had successfully digitised and integrated ad sales at Comcast and NBC, and that Musk might be interested in her track record of cross-selling ads across various platforms as he attempts to turn Twitter from a social media company into a larger media platform.
“If anyone can translate the Musk vision into advantages for marketers she’ll be able to do it,” DiMassimo said. “Even though there’s skepticism and all marketers live in the ‘show me’ state right now with regard to Twitter, if in fact, she does go to Twitter this is a powerfully reassuring move.”
Musk has long insisted he is not the company’s permanent CEO. The Tesla billionaire said in a tweet Thursday that his role will transition to being Twitter’s executive chairman and chief technology officer.
In mid-November, just a few weeks after buying the social media platform for $44 billion, he told a Delaware court that he does not want to be the CEO of any company.
More than a month later, he tweeted in December: “I will resign as CEO as soon as I find someone foolish enough to take the job.” The pledge came after millions of Twitter users asked him to step down in a Twitter poll the billionaire himself created and promised to abide by.
In February, he told a conference he anticipated finding a CEO for San Francisco-based Twitter “probably toward the end of this year.”
Analysts who follow Twitter’s business welcomed the news even without knowing who the replacement will be. Twitter’s advertising business has taken a hit under Musk’s mercurial rule, though the billionaire told BBC last month that the company is now “roughly” breaking even.
“A new CEO is the only way forward for Twitter,” said Insider Intelligence analyst Jasmine Enberg.
“The single biggest problem with Twitter’s ad business was Elon Musk. As he steps back, Twitter can begin to unravel Musk’s personal brand from the company’s corporate image and attempt to regain trust amongadvertisers,” Enberg said. “The success of those efforts will depend on who takes over, but it’s difficult to imagine that the new CEO could be more controversial or damaging to Twitter’s ad business than Musk has been.”
Mike Proulx, research director at Forrester Research, added that advertising is not the only challenge that Twitter’s new CEO will face – after all, Musk has “fundamentally altered” Twitter both as a product and a community, arguably “for the worst.”
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“While he’s stepping back from the CEO title, Musk is far from likely to step back from calling the product shots,” Proulx said.
Shares of Tesla rose about 2 per cent Thursday after Musk made the announcement. Shareholders of the electric car company have been concerned about how much of his attention is being spent on Twitter.
Last November, Musk was questioned in court about how he splits his time among Tesla and his other companies, including SpaceX and Twitter. Musk had to testify in the trial in Delaware’s Court of Chancery over a shareholder’s challenge to his potentially USD 55 billion compensation plan as CEO of the electric car company.
Musk said he never intended to be CEO of Tesla, and that he didn’t want to be chief executive of any other companies either, preferring to see himself as an engineer. Musk also said at the time that he expected an organizational restructuring of Twitter to be completed in the next week or so. It’s been nearly six months since he said that.
Musk’s tenure at Twitter’s helm has been chaotic, and he’s made various promises and proclamations he’s backtracked or never followed up on. He began his first day firing the company’s top executives, followed by roughly 80% of its staff. He’s upended the platform’s verification system and has scaled back content moderation and safeguards against the spread of misinformation.
Bantering with Twitter followers late last year, Musk expressed pessimism about the prospects for a new CEO, saying that person “must like pain a lot” to run a company that “has been in the fast lane to bankruptcy.”
“No one wants the job who can actually keep Twitter alive. There is no successor,” Musk tweeted at the time.
With PTI Inputs
