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Twitter Chief Executive Elon Musk says he’s found a new CEO to run Twitter and its parent company, X Corp., and “she” starts soon.
“Excited to announce that I’ve hired a new CEO for X/Twitter. She will be starting in ~6 weeks!” Musk tweeted Thursday afternoon. “My role will transition to being exec chair & [chief technology officer], overseeing product, software & sysops.”
Musk did not offer any clues as to the identity of Twitter’s incoming CEO, but late Thursday, the Wall Street Journal reported Linda Yaccarino, NBCUniversal’s head of advertising, was in talks to become the CEO.
Yaccarino has worked at Comcast’s
CMCSA,
NBCU for more than a decade, and has been an industry advocate in finding better ways to measure advertising’s effectiveness, according to the Journal.
Yaccarino oversees global, national and local ad sales, partnerships, marketing, ad tech, data, measurement and strategic initiatives, according to her bio, which says she and her team have generated more than $100 billion in ad sales.
“She knows metrics in advertising, and has played in different media,” Timothy Hubbard, assistant professor of management at the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business, said in an interview. “I don’t know much about her, but she can balance Musk somewhat with her flexibility in advertising.”
She and Musk appeared in a keynote conversation at a conference in Miami last month, according to Dateline, before NBCU and Twitter inked a major ad pact for the 2024 Olympics.
Wedbush analyst Dan Ives said the move is good for the stock of Tesla Inc.
TSLA,
where Musk is also CEO.
“Musk stepping down as Twitter CEO sooner than thought is clearly good news overall for Tesla investors,” Ives said on Twitter. “Less time focused on Twitter platform and more time around Tesla SpaceX…balancing act too difficult and needed to make this move sooner rather than later.”
In a note, Ives added: “With the tweet this afternoon, Musk’s reign as CEO of Twitter has finally come to an end and thus will be a positive for Tesla’s stock starting to finally remove this lingering albatross from the story,” and maintained Tesla’s outperform rating.
Tesla shares advanced 1.6% in after-hours trading.
After Musk acquired the social media giant for $44 billion, he posted a Twitter poll in December that asked if he should step down as CEO. A majority (57%) said yes, and he responded saying: “I will resign as CEO as soon as I find someone foolish enough to take the job! After that, I will just run the software & servers teams.”
