Elon Musk says : Linda Yaccarino will be the new CEO of Twitter.

Elon Musk said on Friday that Linda Yaccarino, who used to work for NBCUniversal in advertising, will take over as CEO of Twitter.

Musk, who runs Tesla and Space X, said the day before that he wants to move into the roles of executive chairman and chief technology officer.

Musk said on Friday that Yaccarino “will mostly work on business operations” while he works on “product design and new technology.” “I’m excited to work with Linda to turn this platform into X, the app that does everything,” he said.

Elon Musk says he has picked a new CEO for Twitter and will step down in a few weeks.

Musk said in December that he would step down as CEO of Twitter as soon as he could find someone “foolish enough to take the job.”

Yaccarino quit his job as the head of ad sales at NBCUniversal earlier on Friday. According to the NBCUniversal website, he was in charge of a team of about 2,000 people around the world.

Experts told ABC News that she has long-standing relationships with big advertisers and a strong reputation in the business world.

Mike Proulx, a vice president and research head at Forrester, told ABC News that she changed the way advertising worked at NBCUniversal. “If she succeeds, then Twitter succeeds.”

Yaccarino worked at NBCUniversal for almost 12 years, rising through the top ranks to become chairman of global advertising and partnerships in 2020.

Before joining NBCUniversal, Yaccarino worked as an advertising executive for almost 20 years at Turner Broadcasting Company.

After buying Twitter in October, Musk has worked to improve the company’s finances by cutting costs and bringing in more money through a new paid service.

Dan Ives, managing director of equity research at the investment company Wedbush, told ABC News that the hiring of Yaccarino shows a renewed focus on advertising, which is where Twitter makes most of its money.

“Advertising is the lifeblood of how Twitter makes money, and Musk knows that won’t change,” Ives said. “He needs a marketing expert at the front and center of Twitter to lead the way.”

What’s Linda Yaccarino’s name?

Yaccarino went to Penn State University and got his degree in 1985. He worked in media ads for about 30 years before being named CEO of Twitter on Friday.

Over more than a decade at NBCUniversal, Yaccarino sold more than $100 billion in advertising. Recently, he focused on coordinating advertising across TV, streaming, and online platforms, according to a description of Yaccarino that was taken down on Friday from the company’s website.

For example, when NBC launched its streaming service Peacock in 2020, Yaccarino led a campaign to give a variety of ad formats, such as binge ads that let a viewer watch a show without ads afterward and ads with QR codes that lead viewers to a product.

Proulx said, “It helped close the gap between TV ads and mobile use.” “It’s clear that her background is in advertising for big brands.”

Ives of Wedbush agreed, saying, “She has a strong advertising DNA from NBCUniversal.”

Yaccarino is also involved with the World Economic Forum, which is the group that brings together business and government leaders every year in Davos, Switzerland. She is in charge of the task group on the future of work and sits on the steering committee for the media, entertainment, and culture industries.

In 2018, President Donald Trump put Yaccarino on the President’s Council on Sports, Fitness, and Nutrition. This brought her a lot of attention.

How could Linda Yaccarino make a difference on Twitter?

Experts say that in her new job, Yaccarino will have a lot of power. She will likely try to rebuild marketing ties between Twitter and big brands, since many of them left the platform or reduced their presence there because they were worried about changes made by Musk.

Musk often says that he wants to protect free speech. He is likely to disagree with Yaccarino about how much the platform should moderate material to attract and keep big brands, experts said, which could make her plans more difficult.

“There has been a lot of damage done to the advertising community on Twitter in terms of trust,” Proulx said. “This will depend on not only her reputation in the advertising world, but also her ability to show that Twitter is putting brand safety first.”

“That’s the ultimate question,” he said.

Last July, when Twitter gave its last quarterly earnings report before going private, it said that advertising made up about 91% of total income.

Since he took over, Musk has been trying to bring Twitter Blue back to life as a way to make the platform less reliant on advertising income. Many of Twitter’s biggest advertisers, like Coca-Cola and Unilever, quit spending money on the site.

In order to save a lot of money, the company has cut about 75% of its 7,500-person staff. This makes people worry about Twitter’s ability to keep its platform running.

Musk has said that what he did at Twitter was part of an aggressive plan to save the company from financial trouble. In a December talk on Twitter Spaces, he called it a “emergency fire drill.”

But the change in approach hasn’t made much of a difference in how much money the subscriptions bring in, and the loss of ad dollars has hurt the core business, Proulx said.

“The hope was that Twitter Blue would make up for how much they depend on ads, but that hasn’t happened at all,” Proulx said.

Ives said that Yaccarino will try to get the company to find a middle ground between letting a lot of different content on the platform and making the site appealing to big marketers.

“Advertisers don’t want Musk’s antics and controversy,” he said. “Everything will come to a head in the end.”

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Experts say that Yaccarino will have a hard time taking control of the company because Musk owns it and wants to keep a key leadership role. They also say that her status in the industry will give her more power with Musk.

“She’ll have quiet autonomy,” Peter Harms, a management professor at the University of Alabama, told ABC News. “I think Musk will keep making statements and making suggestions about product directions and features. But in the end, she will be in charge of the day-to-day work.”

Proulx said something similar: “There are very few people who can take on that role with the level of gravitas they need to stand on their own outside of Elon Musk’s halo, and she is one of those people.”

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