Musk announces NBCUniversal’s Linda Yaccarino will be next Twitter CEO
Becoming the CEO of Twitter kinda feels like inheriting a beautiful Victorian house that is rapidly flooding because every single pipe has been intentionally smashed by the previous owner.
By Matty Merritt
May 12, 2023
It’s gotta be a culture shock to leave a multinational media conglomerate for a place that automatically replies to press requests with a poop emoji. Elon Musk announced yesterday that NBCUniversal’s former chair of global advertising and partnerships Linda Yaccarino would succeed him as Twitter CEO, despite coming from the media world Musk despises.
Who is Yaccarino? She’s a heavyweight in the advertising industry, nicknamed “the velvet hammer” for her negotiating tactics. She formally announced leaving NBCUniversal yesterday after spending the last 11 years at the company. But she might be a culture fit after all: Yaccarino backed Musk’s views on free speech when she interviewed him onstage at a conference in Miami last month.
Yaccarino brings something Twitter has desperately lacked since Musk started sleeping in the Twitter office: credibility with advertisers. When Musk took over the platform, ad sales brought in more than 90% of Twitter’s revenue, but after a shaky takeover, advertisers bounced.
Monthly ad revenue from Twitter’s top 1,000 advertisers dropped from roughly $127 million in October 2022 (the month Musk bought the company) to $48 million in January 2023, according to digital marketing analysis firm Pathmatics by Sensor Tower.
Musk tried to replace some of those lost dollars by making people pay for their blue check marks with Twitter Blue, but that flopped. If Musk really wants to turn Twitter into an “everything app,” a good place to start would be getting the best in the biz to bring back advertisers.
Looking ahead…Musk will move to the CTO and executive chairman positions (and perhaps start focusing more on his other companies), but Yaccarino isn’t necessarily set up for success. Becoming the CEO of Twitter kinda feels like inheriting a beautiful Victorian house that is rapidly flooding because the previous owner intentionally smashed every single pipe. Also, a bunch of angry people (some wearing badges!) currently live there.
She’s got her work cut out for her wooing companies: Just yesterday, Twitter removed its autocomplete suggestion function after NBC reported the app was suggesting animal abuse videos to anyone typing “dog” or “cat” into the search bar.—MM
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