After months leading Twitter, the company’s owner, Elon Musk, has tapped NBCUniversal ad sales chief Linda Yaccarino to take the reins as CEO.
NBC announced her departure from the company Friday morning. Thursday evening, a source familiar with the matter told The Post that the two were in advanced talks about the position.
Musk had not publicly named Yaccarino but said Thursday that the new CEO will start in aboutsix weeks, after which he will transition to executive chair and chief technology officer.
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The choice of Yaccarino, a longtime media industry insider, could signal a change at the ailing microblogging platform and prove a relief to advertisers, many of whom left Twitter after Musk took control. Twitter has laid off roughly three-quarters of its staff, and users have complained about outages and a shift in atmosphere amid sweeping Musk-led changes.
Whether Yaccarino will restore Twitter’s pre-Musk culture, double down on the tech executive’s approach or transform it into something else entirely will be a key question of her tenure — and users have wasted no time scraping her history to make predictions. Here’s what we know.
In 2018, Yaccarino was appointed by President Donald Trump to serve a two-year term on his Council on Sports Fitness and Nutrition. As Ad Council chair, Yaccarino also partnered with the Biden White House in 2021 to create a coronavirus vaccine campaign featuring Pope Francis.
Musk and Yaccarino have collaborated previously. The pair appeared onstage together in Miami Beach last month for a talk called “Twitter 2.0: From Conversations to Partnerships,” which was advertised as an “intimate conversation” about Twitter’s role in culture and its future for marketers. NBCUniversal also recently expanded its partnership with Twitter for the 2024 Paris Olympics, a move Yaccarino alluded to in a tweet to Musk last week.
A graduate of Pennsylvania State University, Yaccarino got her start in the media industry as an intern at NBCUniversal’s media planning department, where, she told Salesforce, her “love affair” with media began. She spent nearly two decades in advertising, marketing and acquisitions at Turner before moving back to NBC, where she’s worked for more than a decade.
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