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Elon Musk Names NBCU Ad Chief Linda Yaccarino as Twitter CEO 160

Elon Musk on Friday named longtime media executive Linda Yaccarino as the new CEO of Twitter. "I am excited to welcome Linda Yaccarino as the new CEO of Twitter!" Musk wrote in a tweet. Yaccarino "will focus primarily on business operations, while I focus on product design & new technology," Musk said. Earlier in the day, Yaccarino announced that she was leaving her role as chairman of global advertising and partnerships at NBCUniversal. "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."
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Elon Musk Names NBCU Ad Chief Linda Yaccarino as Twitter CEO

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  • Ion Musk? (Score:1, Redundant)

    wtf is that?

  • "Found a patsy who will be my fall guy" would have been enough.

    • by Z80a ( 971949 )

      Given his other companies, it's possible that it's more of a "got tired of the toy i was playing with, so i hired someone else to handle it while i go play with something else", which is probably good news for twitter.

    • Exactly!!!!
  • That's an odd choice for someone who is saying he wants to challenge the woke mob. NBC Universal and the woke mob are like peas in a pod.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Ron DeSantis said woke was the belief in injustice and the need to fight injustice.

      He also anti-woke.

      Think about that for a minute...

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Ron DeSantis said woke was the belief in injustice and the need to fight injustice.
        He also anti-woke.
        Think about that for a minute...

        It's almost like people have different ideas about what injustice is and who is responsible for it.

        People who are anti-woke would tell you that wokeists assign blame via skin color and that it attempts to set up a caste system according to who is supposedly "under privileged" that curiously doesn't seem to conform to any actual measure of privilege. So you can find that, e.g.

    • > NBC Universal and the woke mob are like peas in a pod.

      She's also a WEF "Global Leader" and committee chair.

      Perhaps Musk wants to make Mars seem more appealing than Earth.

    • by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Friday May 12, 2023 @11:52AM (#63516851)
      She's a big fan of stuff like libs of tiktok. For someone trying to turn Twitter into Fox News 2.0 it's a logical and unsurprising choice.
      • From: [linkedin.com]

        Yaccarino is the Chairman of the WEF's Taskforce on Future of Work and sits on the WEF's Media, Entertainment and Culture Industry Governors Steering Committee. She is also highly engaged with the Value in Media initiative.

        Yeah an executive in the globalist club that's giving corporations social credit scores, and particularly a leader in an the advertising industry that's pushing wokism full tilt, really gives off that 'right wing' vibe.

        • by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Friday May 12, 2023 @07:44PM (#63517899)
          If by "woke" you mean diversity stuff then yeah, advertisers are woke because they want to sell to the most people, and right wing extremists who worry about "woke" aren't much of a market for anything but Fox News, lumpy pillows and catheters.

          She praised diversity... for women. When it was convenient for her personally. That's a pretty common right wing thing. It's like my boomer friends who are against age discrimination but not homophobia.
      • What evidence do you have that she is a fan of libsoftiktok or anything else?

        Because she's a huge figure in the social media world and follows people you don't like so she knows what's going on?

        And what is wrong with libsoftiktok anyway? All the account does is repost liberal videos from TikTok giving them a larger audience. Isn't that what people on social media want??

        You're fucking nuts. Please don't stop being you. I love ya, baby!

  • Job from hell (Score:5, Insightful)

    by battingly ( 5065477 ) on Friday May 12, 2023 @11:29AM (#63516767)
    So she'll be CEO, but her boss will be active in designing the product, probably subverting all her plans. That's a recipe for making her job a complete nightmare.
    • Yeah, it'll be a mess. You know he won't be giving up control. He's only installing her into the position in title and only because the Saudis he borrowed the money from to buy Twitter are forcing him to do so.

      • Don't forget the Twitter poll he ran quite a while back, where he asked if he should give up the CEO role (and said "I will abide by the results of this poll").

        But in any case... Yaccarino will be CEO of Twitter in the same sense that Medvedev was President of Russia a few years ago - she'll have the title but will basically be a puppet.

    • Re:Job from hell (Score:5, Interesting)

      by laughingskeptic ( 1004414 ) on Friday May 12, 2023 @12:35PM (#63516999)
      You are certainly correct, but she is not a newb, I'm sure she understands what she is getting into. She is a content acquisition and monetization pro and now she it going to get to do what she does best as CEO of a company. If Twitter turns around she can take the credit, if it fails, it no one is going to say it is her fault. I am not a Musk fan, but I think this is a great choice that aligns with his goals.
    • Re:Job from hell (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Thelasko ( 1196535 ) on Friday May 12, 2023 @01:33PM (#63517179) Journal

      So she'll be CEO, but her boss will be active in designing the product, probably subverting all her plans. That's a recipe for making her job a complete nightmare.

      I don't know. Gwynne Shotwell [wikipedia.org] has been an executive at SpaceX for over 20 years now. Although she's not CEO, it's understood that she runs the company day-to-day, and Musk provides vision and direction. If Musk and Yaccarino have worked out a similar agreement, it might work out very well.

    • He who writes the code makes the rules.

      Especially if he can't be fired.

      Still very uneasy about inviting WEF inside. What's the plan there?
  • We haven't had any aritcles about Twitter's advertisers fleeing en masse [vox.com] or the number of bots which has flooded in since that pedo guy took over (the very reason he whined he didn't want to buy the company in the first place), yet now this is somehow news? The company is going down no matter who is at the helm.

    When you threaten an organization they have to post [npr.org] or else their own name will be given to someone else, you know how desperate things are.
    • We haven't had any aritcles about Twitter's advertisers fleeing en masse [vox.com] or the number of bots which has flooded in since that pedo guy took over

      Private companies don't have to report on their failures. Public ones do. No surprise it stopped when they didn't have to.

  • to join a sinking ship.
  • How long will it take Elon to knock her up?

  • Someone should start a CEO deadpool. Her tenure will be measured in months.
  • Peacock revolutionized what exactly? You mean the forked Hulu playbook? If self-aggrandizement was a virtue, these people would be saints. Apparently her connections to advertisers is going to help bring advertisers back to Twitter, but whose going to bring the audience back? Personally I have no interest or use for Twitter. I also think Jack Dorseys next project is going to eat Twitters lunch.
  • by organgtool ( 966989 ) on Friday May 12, 2023 @12:06PM (#63516907)
    While I have been a bit of an Elon fanboy many years ago, his acquisition of Twitter never made much sense to me from a business perspective. The company was struggling to make a profit and his acquisition compounded that by adding an estimated billion dollars per year to Twitter's operating costs. In addition to that, Elon said that his plan was to make it a platform for free speech and that he would restore the accounts of people who had been banned. That would obviously pose serious concerns to advertisers on the platform who probably don't want their company's branding featured next to a racist rant or a feminist's call to castrate all men.

    If he had said that he was planning on using some kind of new technology to bring Twitter's operating costs to a bare minimum and run the company as a non-profit while personally bankrolling their operating costs in perpetuity for the sake of having a platform of near-absolute free speech, then his intentions would make sense to me. But I don't understand how anyone can increase the profitability of a company that is funded primarily by advertisements while simultaneously welcoming shit-posting edgelords.

    Love him or hate him, Elon has proven that he can overcome significant challenges. However, those challenges are usually related to producing products and services for consumers and not in an industry where the consumer is the product. In that regard, Twitter is nothing like his previous pursuits and this is the first time I'm having significant doubts about his business decisions. No matter how anyone looks at it, this poor woman has one hell of an uphill battle ahead of her.
    • That would obviously pose serious concerns to advertisers on the platform who probably don't want their company's branding featured next to a racist rant or a feminist's call to castrate all men.

      When it is blatant racist crap, sure... but I think all too often this is used as an excuse to apply censorship to much milder online expressions, especially platforms like Youtube: "Oh our advertisers wouldn't want this". Have they actually asked those advertisers? I bet they haven't... and on a platform like YT it would be rather simple to ask them, using content tags (on Twitter it would be a bit harder, probably).

      I fully agree that this is not at all like Musk's previous ventures. Twitter is not

      • When it is blatant racist crap, sure... but I think all too often this is used as an excuse to apply censorship to much milder online expressions

        I completely agree: "racist" has now become "person I disagree with", which is a shame because being used in this manner is taking the teeth out of the word. At this point, calling someone a racist is almost a meme.

        especially platforms like Youtube: "Oh our advertisers wouldn't want this". Have they actually asked those advertisers

        I love watching videos on Youtu

      • Have they actually asked those advertisers? I bet they haven't...

        I'll bet they haven't had to ask. The advertisers are the ones keeping Twitter in existence, and they know it. They knew it even before Musk started literally making legal threats against advertisers who stopped doing business with Twitter.

        • I don’t know about Twitter, but on YouTube I very much doubt that. Advertisers care about eyeballs. They might object if their ad is shown next to some racist rant and they get pushback from a few activist customers. But some potty mouth game streaming kid? They see 10 million followers in a desirable demographic, you really think they care that the kid is a bit sweary or uses the word “kill” or “death”? Hell no. They’ll ask “can we get more of him please”.
    • Elon went to Capitol hill and had a private meeting with Chuck Schumer a couple weeks ago, and now announces a WEF executive as Twitter CEO.

      I can only imagine the conversation went something like "This is your list of options, or the intelligence community will have six ways to sunday to get back at you"

      She'll be fine. Elon, on the other hand, is going to learn how the screws are turned against people who get in the way of the tyrannical imperative to control speech and information.

  • Twitter is making amazing changes all the time since the takeover. It was a company sitting on its laurels enjoying the result of it's size without changing a thing for years.. The features available are so much better with shared ad revenue with posters, subscriptions, better streaming and live video, better verification, community notes, better self-promotion, better moderation, less caving to federal agencies, and overall less fear of ban over expressing an opinion. It is crazy how one person can make su
    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      I sincerely hope he's paying you for saying that.

Over the shoulder supervision is more a need of the manager than the programming task.

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