Who Is Linda Yaccarino and Why, Exactly, Does She Want to Run Twitter?
Reading Time: 6 minutesElon Musk Picked Who to Run Twitter?, Meet Elon Musk’s hand-picked CEO., Linda Yaccarino is Elon Musk’s new Twitter CEO. Why would she want that job?
On Thursday, Elon Musk announced that he’d found a replacement for himself as CEO of Twitter. His choice, several news outlets have reported since, is Linda Yaccarino, NBCUniversal’s chairman of global advertising and partnerships. Musk made the news official official with a tweet on Friday:
Given that what Twitter needs more than anything right now is advertising dollars after Musk’s early tenure leading the company sent them fleeing—and given that Yaccarino is considered to be one of the most trusted, powerful people in media advertising—she might seem a logical choice for Twitter, at least if the idea is for Twitter to make some money.
Nothing about Twitter, however, is purely about business fundamentals these days, and on social media, many questioned why on earth anyone would want to work for this particular boss at this particular company. But overall, Yaccarino has been far more positive about Musk’s Twitter reign than virtually any other high-profile media executive.
Back in November, after Musk became Chief Twit and consigned the social network to chaos with a spate of firings, product changes, and (to put it mildly) controversial statements, Yaccarino professed her optimism during a speech at an Ad Age conference. ‘You’ve got to give the guy a minute,’ Yaccarino said, adding that she wouldn’t ‘bet against him’ and that she had been ‘obsessed’ with his ‘fascinating’ takeover of Twitter.
This was particularly interesting given that, conceptually, she disapproves of leaders like the world’s second-richest man. ‘I think probably the biggest flaw for a short-term leader would be to think you have the answers to everything,’ she told media adviser Michael Kassan on his Good Company podcast. (That being said, her Twitter bio does state that she’s ‘inspired by provocative leadership.’)
Yaccarino would now seem to be captain of a sinking ship with an inscrutable org chart inside a raging shitstorm; it’s a tough job, in other words. After alienating advertisers, Twitter has ticked off its most prominent users, become noticeably jankier as it has shed most of its staff, and found itself at the center of repeated dustups involving its owner tweeting conspiracy theories and other odious stuff. On the other hand, Tucker Carlson is signing on.
All that, and Musk wants to transform Twitter into ‘X,’ an ‘everything app.’ For now, here’s what you should know about his new everything CEO.
OK, what’s Linda Yaccarino’s deal??
Yaccarino is well respected in the ad world, repeatedly landing on the industry’s key ‘most powerful women’ lists. In March, Ad Age called her ‘TV’s Partnership Power Broker’ and likened her to Captain Sandy Yawn of Bravo’s reality series Below Deck Mediterranean because she’s so even-tempered.
Yaccarino seems to have been eying a next step as a CEO of a major media company for quite some time. When NBCUniversal CEO Jeff Shell stepped down due to a harassment claim, her name emerged as a replacement contender. ‘When CEO roles come open at companies like Univision or Paramount Global, allies and advocates often try to inject her name into conversations about potential candidates,’ Variety reported in February.
Yaccarino held her first role at NBCU as an intern, back when she was a telecommunications student at Penn State. (She graduated in 1985.) Over the years, Yaccarino jumped back and forth between NBCU and Turner Entertainment. In 2011, she joined NBCU as president of cable entertainment and digital advertising sales, moving up the ranks over the next decade to become chairman of global advertising and partnerships in October 2020. As an executive at NBCU, she’s been widely credited with rebuilding its advertising business and uniting the company’s broadcast, cable, and digital assets under a single monetization strategy. She also pushed NBCU to generate cash in new ways, including through e-commerce.
Back up. Why is Musk hiring a CEO?
On Dec. 18, as part of his ongoing habit of governing by poll, Musk tweeted out a survey asking whether he should ‘step down as head of Twitter,’ promising that he would ‘abide by the results.’ More than 17.5 million votes streamed in, with the large majority demanding that Musk indeed resign his post; two days later, he stated that he would cede the position ‘as soon as I find someone foolish enough to take the job! After that, I will just run the software & servers teams.’
Musk didn’t appear to take the prospect seriously for a while. On Valentine’s Day, Musk tweeted out a photo of a Shiba Inu dog named Floki wearing a black turtleneck branded ‘CEO.’ In early April, as MediaDownloader reported, Twitter revealed through a series of legal filings that the company known as ‘Twitter Inc.’ no longer existed, having been merged into a Nevada-based entity called X Corp. Since X Corp. would be owned by a new Musk-controlled private company known as X Holdings Corp., it wasn’t clear whether the company formerly known as Twitter would change its executive leadership at all—especially after Musk claimed the X Corp. switch-up was part of his plans to transform Twitter into a WeChat-style ‘everything app,’ incorporating crypto-payment functions and what-have-you. However, in light of the fact that he’s now offered Yaccarino a role as head of ‘X/Twitter,’ it seems clear he’ll be following the advice of his survey after all.
What sort of relationship do Yaccarino and Musk already have? He’s going to meddle with her role, right?
Yaccarino doesn’t appear to have publicly interacted much with Musk before his purchase of Twitter, but she’s been enthusiastic about the Twitter 2.0 era, even as he invited white supremacists back onto the platform along with other previously banished users. On April 18, she held a keynote discussion with Musk at a marketing-association event in Miami, expressing her agreement that ‘this freedom of speech, deserves a bit more reach.’ Musk used the chat as an opportunity to reassure concerned advertisers that Twitter was not becoming a haven for racism, but also that he wouldn’t compromise on his ‘free speech maximalist’ ethos for the platform: ‘If that means losing advertising dollars, we’ll lose them. But freedom of speech is paramount.’ The day before the keynote, Yaccarino appeared to take heart in Twitter’s announcement that it would offer ‘more transparency to the enforcement actions we take on Tweets.’ She also praised Musk’s interview with Bill Maher about the ‘woke mind virus,’ while liking a bunch of Musk tweets on topics such as the much-hyped X app.
So she’s coming in to rescue the business, huh?
We’ll see. Musk paid $44 billion for Twitter and then promptly drove many advertisers away with his various antics, causing revenue to plummet. The immediate challenge the company faces is making advertisers, who have traditionally provided about 90 percent of Twitter’s revenue, feel good about the company once again. And on this front, it truly would be difficult to find someone better than Yaccarino.
‘She’s probably just what Elon needs to establish trust among advertisers,’ Martin Sorrell, the founder of WPP Plc., one of the world’s largest advertising and PR groups, told Bloomberg.
‘I can say that she would be my first choice, and my only choice, to save the platform from the hands of its owner,’ Lou Paskalis, who advises marketers as chief strategy officer at Ad Fontes Media, wrote on Twitter, adding, ‘I still cannot understand why she’d subject herself to @elonmusk, however!’
Indeed, there are no guarantees that the Musk-Yaccarino business affair will last. Musk is notorious for rapidly turning on people he has invited into his inner circle, and it’s unclear just how involved her new boss will want to be in running Twitter’s day-to-day from his new perch as executive chairman.
Musk’s politics have been … conspicuous, as of late. What are Yaccarino’s like?
In an interview with the Great Minds podcast, Yaccarino credited her parents for shaping her values system. Her father was a police chief and her mother was a first-generation Italian immigrant who did not go to college but believed strongly in education.
Musk supplicants characterize Yaccarino as ‘someone who seems to be of the left,’ and right-wing conspiracists loathe the fact that she’s executive chair of the World Economic Forum, an institution they tend to view as a hive for ‘globalists’ who are utilizing the COVID-19 pandemic to control the masses. Yaccarino has often talked about the importance of one of Musk’s most despised words: diversity. ‘That human interaction by diverse groups of people is where innovation is born,’ she has said, for example.
All that fearmongering aside, Yaccarino’s politics do appear to be pretty solidly in line with Musk’s. She was appointed to an advisory council during the Trump administration. She follows a cast of far-right darlings on Twitter, including Libs of TikTok, Catturd, and Jack Posobiec, and has liked various tweets from heterodox liberal-criticizers like Matt Taibbi, Dave Rubin, and David Sacks, as well as Musk inner-circle members like Jason Calacanis. Oh, and as the New Republic noted, her likes have flirted with election-denial conspiracies as well.
Still, few people seem happy about this choice. On the liberal-left side of things, observers are concerned over the types of right-wingers she follows and likes. But the right isn’t too happy about her WEF ties and past comments in favor of things like medical face masks, COVID vaccines, and recruiting more employees from underrepresented backgrounds. Plenty of prominent conservatives like James Woods are calling this the death of the network, boosting ‘RIP Twitter‘ in the trending topics. The fact that Yaccarino follows Catturd has not mollified the right-wing influencer’s displeasure in the slightest.
Anything else interesting that I should know about the woman who’s about to take the helm of this highly influential company?
She has a twin sister, a nurse and health care consultant whom she bragged about on Twitter during the pandemic.
Her other sister is a banker. She’s the mother of two children, and she occasionally refers to herself as a hockey mom. She and her husband live in Sea Cliff, New York, a small town on Long Island that’s not far from where she grew up. But now, she also lives down in the Twitter muck with the rest of us. Best of luck!
Reference: https://slate.com/technology/2023/05/twitter-ceo-linda-yaccarino-elon-musk-who-is.html
Ref: slate
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