2023-05-12 16:33:00
New York (CNN) — Elon Musk named veteran media executive Linda Yaccarino the new CEO of Twitter on Friday, months after he vowed to step down.
“Excited to welcome Linda Yaccarino as the new CEO of Twitter!” Musk wrote in a tweet on Friday. He said that she will “mainly focus on business operations, while I will focus on product design and new technologies.”
Linda Yaccarino, a veteran media executive, has stepped down as president of global and partnerships at NBCUniversal.
“It has been an honor to be a part of Comcast NBCUniversal and to lead the most incredible team,” he said in a announcement this Friday. “We have transformed our company and the entire industry.”
Musk said Thursday that he had found a new CEO to take over Twitter, months after he first vowed to step down from the role and announced the CEO would start in about six weeks.
Here’s what you need to know about Yaccarino.
Linda Yaccarino
An experienced media executive
Musk has confronted the mainstream media and has also said that he hates publicity. But Yaccarino represents both worlds.
Yaccarino has been with NBCUniversal for more than 11 years, returning to the company where she started as a college intern. She was previously executive vice president and COO of sales, marketing and acquisitions at Turner Broadcasting, which then included CNN.
At NBCUniversal, he oversees a 2,000-member global team, according to the profile of the company That would mean more people on his team than are left working at Twitter, which Musk said in an interview with the BBC last month that he is down to 1,500 people after multiple layoffs under his tenure.
NBCUniversal’s ad sales team has generated $100 billion in ad sales since she joined in 2011, according to her profile, and has forged partnerships with many new media companies, including Twitter, as well as Apple News, Buzzfeed, Snapchat and YouTube.
Last month, he joined Musk at an industry conference in a session titled “Twitter 2.0: From Conversations to Partnerships.”
Yaccarino’s most notable achievement at NBCUniversal is building unified ad sales teams instead of having 15 different sales teams approaching the same advertisers.
“It was difficult to do business with us,” he said in a interview with Salesforce in which he described the consolidation.
The loss of Yaccarino comes at a bad time for NBCUniversal. archyde news revenue is down across the media industry, leading to cost cuts and, in some cases, layoffs at many companies. NBCUniversal has had to do clippings template, although not as deep as those of some of its rivals.
Media companies, including NBC, are scheduled to make upfront presentations to advertisers next week in an effort to secure commitments by the end of this year. The NBC session is scheduled for Monday morning.
Yaccarino would not be the first nor the only woman at the helm of one of Musk’s companies.
Musk previously named Gwynne Shotwell to head SpaceX. She is the company’s president and COO, while he holds the title of CEO. But some in the industry see it as key to SpaceX becoming the world’s most successful commercial rocket company.
Robyn Denholm is also the president of Tesla. She replaced Musk in the job when the SEC forced her to resign after a tweet in which she claimed that she had secured funding to take the company private, when she had not yet secured it.
Denholm has kept a low profile at Tesla, not speaking at an investor day earlier this year at which 15 other Tesla executives besides Musk spoke.
The exodus of Twitter advertisers
Yaccarino’s choice may indicate that Musk recognizes the limitations of his efforts to make Twitter less reliant on .
Ad sales accounted for more than 90% of the company’s revenue before Musk bought it in October. But many advertisers have since abandoned the site.
Earlier this year, digital marketing analytics firm Pathmatics by Sensor Tower reported that 625 of Twitter’s top 1,000 advertisers, including big brands like Coca-Cola, Unilever, Jeep, Wells Fargo and Merck, had divested. , according to data from January 25. Monthly revenue for those 1,000 advertisers plummeted more than 60% between October and January 25, from about $127 million to just over $48 million, according to the data.
Many advertisers have raised concerns about Musk’s severe staff cuts, the apparent rise in hate speech and his controversial policy decisions, such as re-inviting previously banned users to Twitter.
General Motors said it would stop paying for on Twitter while it evaluates the “new direction” of the platform. Musk blamed the exodus on “activist groups lobbying advertisers, even though nothing has changed with content moderation.”
Musk has tried to increase revenue by betting on bolstering his subscription business, charging for the blue ticks that verify a user’s identity, with limited success. As a result, he may be left with no choice but to revive Twitter’s relationships with advertisers and boost its core business.
Musk has previously talked about improving ad sales by focusing more on the relevance of his ads.
Pressure to find a new Twitter CEO
Since expressing interest in buying Twitter, Tesla’s share price has suffered. Investors worried that his fascination with Twitter would distract him from the challenges facing the electric carmaker.
Musk announced the CEO news shortly before Tesla’s annual meeting of shareholders, which is due to be held on Tuesday.
Tesla shares closed Thursday down 55% from where they were 13 months ago, when its initial purchase of a 9% stake in Twitter went public. Tesla shares rose 3% in early trading on Friday just after the open, before losing most of that gain.
“We believe that Musk stepping down as CEO of Twitter sooner than originally thought is positive for both Tesla and SpaceX, as Musk will have to spend more and more time on these platforms, rather than on Twitter,” Wedbush analyst Dan Ives wrote in a note to clients on Friday.
It may also be good news for Twitter users. Musk vowed that he would find a new CEO to run Twitter last fall, after 57% of respondents to a poll he posted on Twitter voted for him to step down. In December he promised to appoint a replacement “as soon as I can find someone dumb enough to take the job!”
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