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Twitter head Elon Musk announced on Friday that he has chosen his replacement as chief executive of the company: Linda Yaccarino.
Here are 4 things to know about the new Twitter CEO:
She’s a former NBCUniversal executive
Yaccarino worked at NBCUniversal for the last 11 years, and most recently was Chairman of Global Advertising & Partnerships. NBCUniversal-parent Comcast
CMCSA,
announced she would be leaving the company on Friday.
Yaccarino said “it has been an absolute honor” to work at NBCUniversal, and has not publicly commented about her move to Twitter.
Prior to her work at NBCUniversal, she worked in advertising at the Turner entertainment company for 19 years, and has never worked at a social media company, according to her LinkedIn profile.
Yaccarino will begin her new position in roughly six weeks, according to a tweet from Musk.
Yaccarino has some history with Musk
Last month, Yaccarino interviewed Musk in front of a crowd at the Possible marketing conference in Miami Beach, Fla. She asked the mercurial Musk about the future of Twitter, some of his controversial tweets and praised his work ethic.
“If freedom of speech, as he says, is the bedrock of this country, I’m not sure there’s anyone in this room who could disagree with that,” she said.
Musk isn’t going anywhere
Musk will no longer be CEO, he says, but he will still be part of the company as the executive chair and chief technical officer.
Musk, who was simultaneously running Twitter, Tesla
TSLA,
and SpaceX, since he bought the social media company last year for $44 billion, claimed last month that Twitter isn’t making or losing money. A leaked Musk email earlier this year stated that Twitter is now worth under $20 billion, or less than half of what he paid for it.
“I feel like we’re headed to a good place. We’re roughly break-even,” Musk said in the BBC interview, streamed on Twitter Spaces. “I think we’re trending toward being cash-flow positive very soon, literally in a matter of months.”
Related (April 2023): NPR’s CEO: ‘I have lost my faith in the decision-making’ at Twitter under Elon Musk
Yaccarino faces major challenges at Twitter
Surely one of Yaccarino’s top task’s will be to repair Twitter’s relationship’s with advertisers.
In 2021, a year before to Musk’s takeover, 90% of Twitters revenue came from advertising. And Twitter’s adjusted earnings and total revenue dropped roughly 40% year-over-year in December, according to WSJ.
Twitter has also experienced issued surrounding its flagship blue verification badges. The company removed millions of its blue check marks in April, hoping to get accounts to pay $8 a month for the badge, and a vast majority of verified accounts did not pay up.
Just 116,000 of Twitter’s 500 million monthly active users signed up for Twitter Blue, according to a Bloomberg report.
The blue check marks first started 14 years ago to verify the identities of celebrities and noteworthy people, politicians, journalists and publications. Some believe the lack of a thoughtful verification system subjects Twitter users to misinformation and impersonation.
Read on: Twitter launches encrypted messaging, but ‘don’t trust it yet,’ Elon Musk warns
