Elon Musk said Friday that Linda Yaccarino, the former head of advertising at NBCUniversal, will succeed him as Twitter’s chief executive officer, with a focus on business operations.
“Looking forward to working with Linda to transform this platform into X, the everything app,” Musk said in a post on Twitter. The billionaire entrepreneur plans to focus on product design and new technology, and will serve as executive chairman.
Musk said Thursday that he had found a successor who would take over in about six weeks, but didn’t provide a name.
Yaccarino had been head of global advertising and partnerships at NBCUniversal, where she had been an executive since 2011. NBCUniversal said in a statement on Friday that the executive was leaving the company with immediate effect, although it didn’t give a reason.
“It has been an absolute honor to be part of Comcast NBCUniversal and lead the most incredible team. We’ve transformed our company and the entire industry—and I am so proud of what we’ve accomplished together,” Yaccarino said in the NBCUniversal statement.
Here are three key things to know about Yaccarino:
She’s an Advertising Expert
Yaccarino has long been a senior advertising executive, meaning she has the experience and industry relationships necessary to persuade advertisers to come back to Twitter.
A recent forecast by analysts at Insider Intelligence forecast that Twitter’s income from advertising will fall by 28% this year, with several major advertisers having suspended their activities on the site following Musk’s takeover. Yaccarino would be a major asset in persuading advertisers it is safe to return.
Yaccarino was also key in the launch of NBC’s ad-supported Peacock streaming service. Musk appears to have aspirations to make Twitter into a more popular platform for monetized content: He said earlier this year it would start sharing revenue from advertisements with some of its content creators.
“We believe that this would be a homerun hire for Twitter and fit in very well to the overall Twitter strategy and monetization looking ahead,” Wedbush’s Daniel Ives wrote in a research note on Friday.
She Has Experience with Twitter
Yaccarino’s team at NBCUniversal is responsible for partnerships with social-media companies including Twitter, and she is a frequent user of the platform. Yaccarino’s is one of the 289 Twitter accounts that Musk follows on the platform.
She also interviewed Musk himself at a marketing conference in Miami last month.
“We heard very clearly that Twitter is committed to freedom of speech (not freedom of reach), accountability, and ultimate transparency. Those are things we can all get behind,” Yacarino wrote in a LinkedIn post following the interview.
A sign of the value she sees in the platform might have been on show recently, when NBCUniversal broadened a deal with Twitter around the 2024 Paris Olympics, a high-profile endorsement of the social-media network’s advertising reach.
She’s Worked With Both Political Parties
Yaccarino has worked with Republican and Democrat administrations, which could reassure advertisers and users over her ability to steer Twitter away from dangerous political waters.
“I think people from both sides of the political spectrum will find Linda to be smart, fair and reasonable,” Musk said on Twitter.
Yaccarino was appointed to the President’s Council on Sports Fitness and Nutrition by former President Donald Trump in 2018. She then worked with the administration of President Joe Biden on a coronavirus vaccine advertising campaign in her role as chair of the Ad Council, a nonprofit organization.
She also works with the World Economic Forum, an organization of political and business leaders, as chair of its Taskforce on the Future of Work. Musk has criticized the WEF, accusing it earlier this year of “increasingly becoming an unelected world government”.
Write to Adam Clark at adam.clark@barrons.com
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