Who Is Linda Yaccarino And Why Is Elon Musk’s New Twitter CEO So Divisive? – SlashGear

It was likely inevitable that Musk would step down as CEO, poll or not. Investors from his other companies — especially Tesla, which has been struggling — have shown concern that Musk was stretching himself too thin by being so hands-on at Twitter. With Twitter still struggling to hold onto advertisers, where most of its income comes from, Linda Yaccarino is a logical choice to replace Musk. Until resigning shortly after Musk announced Twitter would have a new CEO, Yaccarino was the Chairman of Global Advertising & Partnerships at NBCUniversal, where she has worked for over 11 years. There, she oversaw a team of 2,000 employees that generated over $100 billion in ad sales for parent company Comcast. In particular, she fostered relationships between the old media giant and newer tech companies like BuzzFeed, Snapchat, Apple News, and, notably, Twitter. (Yaccarino has had a personal Twitter account since 2012.) Yaccarino even spoke with Musk in a public keynote last month about the complicated connections between Twitter’s platform, cultural conversations, and advertisers.

By bringing in Yaccarino, Musk is placing Twitter in the hands of someone with decades of media experience. Long before becoming chairman at NBCUniversal, Yaccarino got her start as an intern in its media planning department, shortly after graduating from Penn State. In 1992, she moved to Turner, where she worked her way up to Executive Vice President/COO of Advertising Sales, Marketing, And Acquisitions, before returning to NBCUniversal in 2011. Her wealth of experience and status as an industry insider should placate advertisers wary of spending money on Musk’s Twitter, and possibly bring back the ones who’ve already left. By all accounts, she seems like a rational choice for CEO. So why is the announcement already causing an uproar?