Elon Musk has appointed top ad executive Linda Yaccarino to run Twitter on a daily basis as he attempts to turn around the faltering platform he purchased for $44 billion last year.
Yaccarino is a well-known advertising executive who resigned from NBCUniversal “effectively immediately” on Friday, amid speculation that she will succeed the erratic entrepreneur as CEO of Twitter.
Twitter is struggling to regain its footing following Musk’s contentious takeover, which saw him fire hundreds of employees and reintroduce far-right and controversial characters to the network, spooking away its highest-paying advertisers.
Musk teased Yaccarino’s employment on Thursday, claiming in a tweet that he had chosen a woman to replace him as CEO of Twitter and its parent company, the newly renamed X Corporation, but did not divulge her name.
Yaccarino left the firm that controls NBC, Universal, and Telemundo, where she had worked since 2011, just weeks after interviewing Musk at a marketing conference in Miami.
Asked by Yaccarino at the time how it’s been going since the acquisition, Musk replied: “It’s going well…It’s entertaining….It’s a trainwreck sometimes.”
Yaccarino is one of the advertising industry’s most renowned executives, but he will face a difficult task in convincing major corporations to return to the platform.
Musk stated in a tweet that he will continue to be in charge of design and technology at Twitter, with Yaccarino focused on business operations and transforming Twitter into a “everything app” named X.
Musk’s association with the letter X dates back to 1999, when he was a co-founder of X.com, an online bank that was purchased and then became PayPal.
He has also wished to create a “everything app” fashioned after China’s WeChat, which acts as a Twitter-like social media platform as well as delivering texting and mobile payments.
According to the company’s website, at NBCUniversal Yaccarino led a team of 2,000 people and “reengineered the advertising business for the 21st century.”
Musk has entirely owned Twitter since late October and has regularly courted controversy as CEO, dismissing the vast majority of its employees, reinstating far-right personalities, suspending journalists, and charging for previously free services.
With Yaccarino’s employment, he is fulfilling a promise he made in December to honor the results of a Twitter poll he posted.
In that unscientific survey, a total of 57.5 percent of more than 17 million accounts voted for him to step down.
Wall Street had grown frustrated that Twitter was luring Musk away from his other businesses, and share prices in Tesla rose on news he had found a CEO.
