Elon Musk yesterday announced that he had found someone to replace him as Twitter’s chief executive officer. While he didn’t mention who it was besides hinting at the new CEO being a female, the billionaire has today confirmed it is Linda Yaccarino, the former head of advertising at NBCUniversal.
“I am excited to welcome Linda Yaccarino as the new CEO of Twitter!” Musk said in a tweet further stating that the Penn State graduate “will focus primarily on business operations, while I focus on product design & new technology.”
Yaccarino will start her work as the new head of Twitter in six (6) weeks according to Musk’s Thursday tweet.
Last month she interviewed Musk at her “Possible” advertising conference in Miami in which she told the billionaire 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”. In the same interview Yaccarino also said: “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 December, the Tesla boss had said that he would step down as the head of Twitter once he found someone “foolish enough” to take on the position.
“I will resign as CEO as soon as I find someone foolish enough to take the job! After that, I will just run the software and servers teams,” Musk tweeted at the time.
Since his chaotic takeover of Twitter for $44 billion six months ago, the social site has seen rapid changes some of which drove away major advertisers and led to the birth of secession Twitter clones such as Spoutible.
Under Musk’s leadership, Twitter laid off around 90% of its employees and reinstated the account of former President Trump. The online platform also introduced a paid verification service and stripped away blue badges from legacy verified users selling them to everyone who is willing to pay.
Additionally, the company also axed Covid-19 misinformation rules and banned an account that tracked the location of Musk’s private jet which was followed with a mass suspension of the journalists who reported on the ban before unsuspending them later after black lash.
Twitter later tried to ban users from linking or mentioning their usernames to a number of rival social platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, and others and recently, the online platform also shut down almost all free access to the its API and introduced a new fee structure for API access that could cost some enterprises as much as $42,000 per month.
