NBCUniversal advertising chief Linda Yaccarino is taking the helm at Twitter, where she will confront an exodus of marketers who have left the social-media platform since Elon Musk took over.
“I am excited to welcome Linda Yaccarino as the new CEO of Twitter!” Musk posted in a tweet Friday after NBCUniversal announced her departure. “Looking forward to working with Linda to transform this platform into X, the everything app.” The billionaire said he will become chief technology officer and executive chairman.
Yaccarino may be in a unique position to deal with the fallout from Musk’s takeover of Twitter last year. Despite a slight uptick in daily users since early 2022, Twitter’s revenue has fallen by 50% since October as a result of a “massive decline” in advertising, Musk said in March. At NBC, Yaccarino helped launch the ad-supported streaming service Peacock and has led partnerships with a variety of tech companies, including Snapchat, YouTube, and, of course, Twitter.
“She’s probably just what Elon needs to establish trust among advertisers,” said Martin Sorrell, chairman of S4Capital Plc and former CEO of WPP Plc. “She’s going to have to do something to make sure that everything is hunky-dory from an operations standpoint.”
Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion last October and indicated that he’d only be in charge for a limited time to complete the organizational overhaul he thought the company needed to prosper. In December, Musk asked his Twitter followers if he should step down as CEO, and 57.5% said yes.
As the CEO also of of Tesla Inc. and Space Exploration Technologies Corp., Musk complained of having “too much work” and sleeping at Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters while implementing radical changes.
Article first appeared on Bloomberg