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It’s official: Elon Musk on Friday named Linda Yaccarino, a veteran media executive with experience in advertising, as Twitter’s new CEO, months after promising to cede control.
“I am excited to welcome Linda Yaccarino as the new CEO of Twitter!” Musk wrote in a tweet on Friday. He said she “will focus primarily on business operations, while I focus on product design & new technology.”
Earlier in the day, Yaccarino announced that she was leaving her role as chairman of global advertising and partnerships at Comcast Corp.’s
CMCSA,
NBCUniversal.
“It has been an absolute honor to be part of Comcast NBCUniversal and lead the most incredible team,” she said in a statement Friday. “We’ve transformed our company and the entire industry.”
Yaccarino faces steep challenges at a company facing hemorrhaging of advertisers, an influx of hate speech, and regulatory scrutiny. Meanwhile, Musk’s new role as Twitter’s glorified chief technology officer frees him up to concentrate more as CEO at his other gig, Tesla Inc.
TSLA,
At NBCU, Yaccarino oversaw 2,000 employees, according to her company profile. That’s more than the roughly 1,500 people still left at Twitter after several rounds of layoffs under Musk.
Since Yaccarino joined NBCU in 2011, the company’s ad sales team generated $100 billion in sales and forged partnerships with Twitter, Apple Inc.’s
AAPL,
Apple News, BuzzFeed, Snap Inc.
SNAP,
and Alphabet Inc.’s
GOOGL,
GOOG,
YouTube, according to her bio. At NBCU, she helped create unified ad sales teams.
Last month, she appeared with Musk at an industry conference for a session entitled “Twitter 2.0: From Conversations to Partnerships.”
