Elon Musk at the 2022 Met Gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on May 2, 2022 in New York and Linda Yaccarino in New York on September 28, 2016 in New York City (AFP/Archives/Angela Weiss, D Dipasupil)
Elon Musk announced on Friday that he had appointed Linda Yaccarino, until then responsible for advertising within the NBCUniversal group, as the new boss of Twitter, six months after having bought the social network which he will nevertheless retain control.
“I am delighted to welcome Linda Yaccarino as the new CEO of Twitter!”, He declared on his platform, where he has the most followed account. “She will focus mainly on business, while I will take care of product design and new technologies”.
The majority shareholder of Twitter had already announced the day before that he had hired a woman to lead the company, specifying that he would become “executive chairman of the board of directors and chief technology officer, to oversee products, software and activities”.
Earlier Friday, NBCUniversal released a statement saying Linda Yaccarino had resigned from her position.
During her twelve years with this subsidiary of the cable operator Comcast, she helped unify all of the group’s media within a single advertising platform in order to simplify the offer to advertisers. It has also worked to improve advertising effectiveness indicators.
With a career spanning more than 30 years in television advertising (she also worked for the Turner group), she should bring experience to the social network, but also an address book provided, at a time when Twitter is suffering from advertiser disengagement.
– “The all-purpose app” –
Since the takeover of Twitter by Elon Musk in October, many have disengaged, scalded by the hussar, unpredictable management of the boiling billionaire, as well as by uncertainties about the moderation of content.
Linda Yaccarino on stage at a content conference in New York in 2016 (GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA/AFP/Archives/D Dipasupil)
In particular, he dismissed more than two-thirds of the employees, let back controversial personalities who had been banned from the network and upset the account authentication system.
The boss of Tesla and SpaceX had made a survey in December to ask users of the platform whether or not he should give up the site. Some 17 million of them had spoken, including 57% in favor of his departure.
After some dithering – he had insinuated that this result was the result of an army of automated accounts – Elon Musk had ended up tweeting that he planned to leave as soon as he had “found someone crazy enough” for him succeed.
“I look forward to working with Linda to transform this platform into X, the do-it-all app,” he said Friday.
The billionaire renamed the company “X Corp” last month. He regularly talks about his nebulous project to make Twitter a multi-faceted application, with financial services, like WeChat in China.
Linda Yaccarino interviewed him a few weeks ago at a marketing conference in Miami. Asked about the situation within Twitter since the acquisition, he replied: “It’s going well… It’s entertaining… It’s a disaster sometimes”.
© 2023 AFP
Did you like this article ? Share it with your friends with the buttons below.
