Elon Musk Names New Twitter CEO, Linda Yaccarino

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Succession

The former NBCUniversal exec will reportedly take over the company in about six weeks as Musk plans to focus on “product design & new technology”

Months after losing his own poll and promising to step down as CEO of Twitter, Elon Musk has finally followed through. On Friday, Musk officially announced his replacement, naming Linda Yaccarino as the new Twitter lead.

In a tweet, Musk wrote that Yaccarino “will focus primarily on business operations, while I focus on product design & new technology. Looking forward to working with Linda to transform this platform into X, the everything app.”

Musk first teased the appointment Thursday, writing that he’d hired a new CEO and that she would start in about six weeks. Musk added that his “role will transition to being exec chair & CTO overseeing product, software & sysops [system operations].” 

Reports that Yaccarino would take over as CEO started to trickle in not long after Musk’s first post about it. Yaccarino most recently served as NBCUniversal’s chairman of global advertising and partnerships. As The Washington Post notes, her work at NBCU involved lucrative partnerships with various tech companies, including Twitter, as well as consolidating the company’s various sales and marketing teams — expertise that could be useful as Twitter tries to woo back the advertisers that have fled amidst the proliferation of hate speech on Twitter (which researchers have said has only increased since Musk’s takeover). 

Yaccarino’s appointment, however, seems like it’ll make few people happy. Those averse to Musk’s far-right flirtations and “free speech” grandstanding have noted Yaccarino’s own Twitter follows include controversial accounts and figures like LibsOfTikTok founder Chaya Raichik, Catturd, the Babylon Bee, and 2024 Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy.

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But those not averse to Musk’s far-right flirtations and “free speech” grandstanding were also put off by Yaccarino’s work with the World Economic Forum, the lobbying organization for multinational conglomerations famous for its annual conference in Davos. The replies to Musk’s announcement of Yaccarino’s appointment found his typically devoted army of paid subscribers getting both mad and disappointed. 

Maybe Musk should’ve just made his dog CEO.

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