Elon Musk, who has been Twitter’s top boss since he acquired the platform for $44 billion last year, has hired NBCUniversal’s head of advertising Linda Yaccarino to fill the role of CEO.
“Excited to announce that I’ve hired a new CEO for X/Twitter,” Musk tweeted. “She will be starting in ~6 weeks!”
The mogul added that he would transition to a role as executive chairman and chief technology officer “overseeing product, software & sysops.”
Excited to announce that I’ve hired a new CEO for X/Twitter. She will be starting in ~6 weeks!
My role will transition to being exec chair & CTO, overseeing product, software & sysops.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 11, 2023
Yaccarino is chairman of global advertising and partnerships at NBCUniversal, where she oversees a staff of 2,000 that has produced more than $100 billion in ad sales, according to her profile on the company’s website. Her department has established partnerships with Apple News, Snapchat, BuzzFeed, and Twitter, among others.
A long-time media industry insider, the positioning of Yaccarino could indicate change for the platform. Whether she will reinstate Twitter’s pre-Musk culture or integrate the tech executive’s philosophies even further or simply take a different approach altogether, it will be fascinating to watch wich direction she takes the platform.
The management change cites the most recent significant step in Musk’s renovation of Twitter. The billionaire has claimed for months that he would take a back seat on the day-to-day operations once he had found a candidate who was the right fit.
With concerns of tamping down on free-speech initiatives, some Musk supporters are focusing on Yaccarino’s efforts with the World Economic Forum, a group of global business leaders and political power agents that Musk has previously criticized. She is chairman on the Taskforce on the Future of Work At the WEF — which endorses globalization — and according to Yaccarino’s LinkedIn profile, she is on the committee for entertainment, media, and culture.
Musk tweeted in response to some of the concerns, stating that the platform’s “commitment to open-source transparency and accepting a wide range of viewpoints remains unchanged.”
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