Linda Yaccarino is Twitter’s new CEO: Here’s what to know

Update Friday, 12:30 p.m. ET:

After rumors swelled for several hours, Elon Musk finally announced on Friday that he has named Linda Yaccarino, a longtime executive at NBCUniversal, as the new chief executive of Twitter. According to Musk, Yaccarino will handle the business side of the company while he focuses on product design and technology. NBCUniversal announced Yaccarino’s departure earlier today.

Original story:

For many Twitter users, (May 22, 2023) was the first good news about the platform they’d heard in ages: Elon Musk announced that he had found a new CEO for Twitter. “Excited to announce that I’ve hired a new CEO for X/Twitter. She will be starting in ~6 weeks!” Musk wrote on his platform.

But besides the “she” pronoun indicating the new CEO’s gender, Musk didn’t reveal any more information about who, exactly, he had hired. However, media outlets including CNBC have reported that Linda Yaccarino, NBCUniversal’s advertising chief, is in advanced talks for the role. Here’s what you need to know about Twitter’s potential new CEO:

She’a an ad person: Which is just the kind of person Twitter desperately needs right now. According to her LinkedIn profile, Yaccarino has worked at NBCUniversal for almost a dozen years. She started as president of its cable entertainment and digital advertising sales unit in 2011, before moving on to become chairman of advertising and client partnerships in 2012, and then chairman of global advertising and partnerships, a position she’s held since 2020. Before NCBUniversal, Yaccarino was executive vice president and chief operating officer of advertising sales, marketing, and acquisitions at Turner.
She loves Penn State Football: That probably has to do with the fact that Yaccarino graduated from Penn State University with a degree in liberal arts and telecommunications in 1985.
She’s got the right Twitter cred: Yaccarino has been a Twitter user with the handle @lindayacc since April 2012. She follows 1,161 users and has almost 22,000 followers. And, yes, she and Elon Musk follow each other. Oh, and she appears subscribe to Twitter Blue.
She has a public history with Musk: Yaccarino interviewed Elon Musk at the MMA POSSIBLE marketing conference in Miami earlier this year. You can watch it for yourself here.

So is Yaccarino a good pick for the job? She certainly seems to be a wise pick—if this is who Musk has indeed chosen. Yaccarino is an expert in advertising and has over a decade of experience and relationships with some of the largest advertisers in the world. Twitter desperately needs someone like that.

Ever since Musk first took over Twitter in October 2022, advertisers have fled the platform. Not only could a new CEO incentivize advertisers to give Twitter another look, but Yaccarino as CEO would speak their language better than anyone.