Months after Elon Musk promised to step back from his role as the CEO of Twitter, the tech entrepreneur on Friday, named longtime media executive Linda Yaccarino as the new boss.
“I am excited to welcome Linda Yaccarino as the new CEO of Twitter!” Musk wrote in a tweet on Friday.
He said she “will focus primarily on business operations, while I focus on product design & new technology.”
Earlier in the day, Yaccarino announced that she was leaving her role as chairman of global advertising and partnerships at NBCUniversal.
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“It has been an absolute honor to be part of Comcast NBCUniversal and lead the most incredible team,” she said in a statement Friday. “We’ve transformed our company and the entire industry.”
As CEO, Yaccarino will face a long list of challenges that have piled up under Musk’s ownership, including an advertiser exodus, service disruptions, regulatory scrutiny and a growing list of rivals. Musk’s controversial policy changes and statements have also alienated some longtime Twitter users.
Even as Musk steps back from the CEO role, he will likely still maintain significant control over the future direction of the company. Musk previously said he would serve as the interim company’s executive chairman and CTO, as well as being the owner of the platform.
Yaccarino has been at NBCUniversal for more than 11 years, returning to the company where she started as a college intern. Before that she was executive vice president/COO of advertising sales, marketing and acquisitions at Turner Broadcasting, which included CNN at that time.
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At NBCUniversal, she oversees a 2,000-member global team, according to her company profile. That would be more people on her team than are left working at Twitter, which Musk said in an interview with the BBC last month is down to 1,500 people after multiple layoffs under his watch.
NBCUniversal’s ad sales team has generated $100 billion in ad sales since she joined in 2011, according to her profile, and forged partnerships with many new media companies including Twitter as well as Apple News, Buzzfeed, Snapchat and YouTube.
Last month she appeared with Musk at an industry conference for a session entitled “Twitter 2.0: From Conversations to Partnerships.”
Yaccarino’s most notable achievement at NBCUniversal is creating unified ad sales teams rather than having 15 different sales teams approach the same advertisers.
“We were difficult to do business with,” she said in an interview with Salesforce describing the consolidation.
