Elon Musk has found his replacement as Twitter chief executive and has announced she will start at the social media platform in about six weeks, with a US advertising executive tipped to take the role.
Twitter’s owner and chief executive said in December he was stepping down as soon as he found someone “foolish enough to take the job”. Musk said on Thursday that the wait was over as he tweeted: “Excited to announce that I’ve hired a new CEO for X/Twitter. She will be starting in ~6 weeks!”
Musk did not name the executive but the Wall Street Journal reported that NBCUniversal’s global head of advertising, Linda Yaccarino, is in talks to take on the role. NBCUniversal, the entertainment conglomerate behind the NBC TV network and the Universal film studio, announced on Friday that Yaccarino had left the business but did not reveal if she was moving to a new role elsewhere.
Musk indicated in his tweet he would still have a hands-on role at a business he bought for $44bn (£35bn) last October, stating that he will be executive chair at Twitter and have responsibility for several areas, including the platform’s IT infrastructure.
“My role will transition to being exec chair & CTO, overseeing product, software & sysops,” Musk wrote in the tweet announcing his replacement as CEO.
Excited to announce that I’ve hired a new CEO for X/Twitter. She will be starting in ~6 weeks!
My role will transition to being exec chair & CTO, overseeing product, software & sysops.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 11, 2023
Yaccarino is active on Twitter and has almost 19,000 followers. Her most recent tweets focused largely on NBC programming and NBC’s ad-supported Peacock streaming service, which Yaccarino had a key role in launching.
Yaccarino also interviewed Musk onstage at an advertising conference in Miami last month, in which she told the Tesla boss that some advertisers “have a challenge with your points of view”, to which Musk replied that some of his tweets should be taken with a “grain of salt”. Yaccarino also said in the interview: “If freedom of speech, as he says, is the bedrock of this country, I’m not sure there’s anyone in this room who could disagree with that.”
In April, Yaccarino also tweeted a clip from an interview between Musk and the comedian Bill Maher on the HBO show Real Time Bill Maher, in which she tagged Musk with an “on fire” emoji. In the clip, Musk is asked by Maher about the “woke mind virus”, prompting Musk to state that the world needed to be “cautious” about anything that is “anti-meritocratic” and “results in the suppression of free speech”.
Twitter has been contacted for comment. Comcast, NBCUniversal’s parent, said on Friday Yaccarino had left NBCUniversal “effective immediately” and thanked her for her 12-year career at the company.
Musk, whose tenure as chief executive has been marked by controversy, had told a Delaware court in November he expected to reduce his time at Twitter and eventually find a new leader to run the social media company. In December, he confirmed this, tweeting: “I will resign as CEO as soon as I find someone foolish enough to take the job.”
Last month, it emerged that Twitter had been folded into a newly created shell company, X Corp – the company referenced in Musk’s tweet on Thursday. Musk has referred to Twitter as being an “accelerant” for creating X, his “everything app” akin to WeChat in China.
Musk took over as Twitter boss as soon he completed the takeover and after immediately firing the company’s top executives, including the then chief executive Parag Agrawal. Days later he cut almost half of Twitter’s 7,500 person-strong workforce, with the current staffing level at about 1,500 people.
Musk’s adherence to free speech principles as a self-declared “free speech absolutist” has caused controversy and jarred with advertisers – Twitter’s main source of income. Twitter’s owner has overseen the reinstatement of previously banned accounts, such as those belonging to Donald Trump and the misogynist influencer Andrew Tate.
Concerns over hateful content and a botched relaunch of Twitter’s subscription product led to advertisers halting their spending on the platform, with Musk revealing in March that the company’s heavily ad-dependent income is due to drop to less than $3bn this year, down from $5.1bn in 2021.
The company’s initial relaunch last year of its subscription service, Twitter Blue, was chaotic, after pranksters took advantage of the opportunity to verify their account for $8 a month by launching fake accounts for brands including the pharmaceutical firm Eli Lilly and public figures including the pope.
Meanwhile, Twitter’s former boss has sued the company over legal fees.
It was reported in March that the company is worth less than half of what Musk paid for it last autumn. He said last month that Twitter, which took on borrowings of $13bn as part of Musk’s takeover funding, was “roughly breaking even”, having compensated for the revenue slump with an aggressive cost-cutting agenda.
If Twitter were to get a new chief executive, the move could allay concerns of investors at Tesla, who have been increasingly worried about the time that Musk is devoting to turning around Twitter. Tesla shares jumped 2.4% in trading volume as the news broke.
“The boat anchor called Twitter is loosened from Musk’s ankle. Now he can get back to spending more time creating value at Tesla,” said Craig Irwin, an analyst at the US financial services firm Roth MKM.
