The new CEO of Twitter is Linda Yaccarino, who stepped down on Friday as the head of advertising at NBCUniversal, where she's been for more than a decade, and helped launch the company’s ad-supported Peacock streaming service..Yaccarino’s departure from NBCUniversal was confirmed in a press release one day after Musk cryptically announced he had hired a female executive who “will be starting in ~6 weeks,” reports The New York Post..“It has been an absolute honour to be part of Comcast NBCUniversal and lead the most incredible team,” Yaccarino said in a statement..“We’ve transformed our company and the entire industry and I am so proud of what we’ve accomplished together, and grateful to my colleagues and mentors, especially Brian Roberts, Mike Cavanagh and the entire NBCU leadership team.”.CNN reports, “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.”.At NBCUniversal, Yaccarino oversaw 2,000 staff on her team, which as CNN says, “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.”.Yaccarino’s team reportedly generated US$100 billion in ad sales since she joined in 2011, according to her profile, forging relationships with new media companies including Twitter, Apple News, Buzzfeed, Snapchat and YouTube, says CNN, adding “last month she appeared with Musk at an industry conference for a session entitled ‘Twitter 2.0: From Conversations to Partnerships.’”.At NBCUniversal, she consolidated 15 different sales teams into one, making it easier to deal with advertisers..“We were difficult to do business with,” she said in an interview with Salesforce describing the consolidation..Since Musk bought Twitter it experienced a series of ups and downs, from initially laying 75% of its staff, exposing government and media interference of Twitter in the Twitter Files and generally taken the platform to a wide-open area of discussions and opinions, while taking it more to the right of centre than it was before he took over. .The volatility has drastically affected Twitter’s ad revenues..In April, Research firm Insider Intelligence cut its forecast for Twitter's global ad revenue this year by 37% to US$2.98 billion, representing a 28% decline from Twitter's 2022 ad revenue of US$4.14 billion..Musk said he would transition to a role as executive chairman and chief technology officer “overseeing product, software & sysops.”.One of Musk’s biggest changes was in April, when court filings showed Twitter Inc. no longer existed as an independent entity, merging with a new company firm called X Corp., Bloomberg and other outlets reported..Musk described his acquisition of Twitter as an “accelerant” for his plans to build a super-app similar to Tencent-owned WeChat, which allows users access to an array of services ranging from payments to food delivery and beyond, says The Post.
