San Francisco, May 12 (AFP\/APP): Elon Musk has chosen top ad executive Linda Yaccarino to take the day-to-day reins of Twitter as he fights to reverse the tide at the struggling platform he bought for $44 billion last year.<\/p>\n
Yaccarino is a highly respected advertising executive who stepped down from NBCUniversal “effectively immediately” on Friday as rumors swirled that she would replace the mercurial tycoon as Twitter CEO.<\/p>\n
Twitter is struggling to find its footing after Musk’s controversial takeover that saw him fire thousands of staff and welcome back far-right and controversial figures on the platform, spooking away its highest paying advertisers.<\/p>\n
Musk on Thursday teased Yaccarino’s hiring saying in a tweet that he had hired a woman to replace him as boss of Twitter and its newly named X Corporation parent, but without revealing the name.<\/p>\n
Yaccarino’s departure from the company that owns NBC, Universal and Telemundo — where she has been since 2011 — came a few weeks after she interviewed Musk at a marketing conference in Miami.<\/p>\n
Asked by Yaccarino at the time how it’s been going since the acquisition, Musk replied: “It’s going well…It’s entertaining….It’s a trainwreck sometimes.”<\/p>\n
Yaccarino is one of the advertising industry’s most respected executives, but will face an uphill battle trying to attract major companies to come back to the platform.<\/p>\n
In a tweet, Musk said he would remain in charge of design and technology at Twitter, with Yaccarino focusing primarily on business operations and turning Twitter into an “everything app” called X.<\/p>\n
Musk’s history with the letter X goes back to 1999 when he helped created X.com, an online bank that was bought and later morphed into PayPal.<\/p>\n
He has also longed to create a so-called everything app that would be modeled on China’s WeChat which functions as Twitter-like social media as well as offering messaging and mobile payments.<\/p>\n
According to the company’s website, at NBCUniversal Yaccarino led a team of 2,000 people and “reengineered the advertising business for the 21st century.”<\/p>\n
Musk has fully owned Twitter since late October and has repeatedly courted controversy as CEO, sacking most of its staff, readmitting far-right figures to the platform, suspending journalists and charging for previously free services.<\/p>\n
With Yaccarino’s hiring, he is belatedly fulfilling the promise he made to honor the results of a Twitter poll he posted in December.<\/p>\n
In that unscientific survey, a total of 57.5 percent of more than 17 million accounts voted for him to step down.<\/p>\n
Wall Street had grown frustrated that Twitter was luring Musk away from his other businesses, and share prices in Tesla rose on news he had found a CEO.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
San Francisco, May 12 (AFP\/APP): Elon Musk has chosen top ad executive Linda Yaccarino to take the day-to-day reins of Twitter as he fights to reverse the tide at the struggling platform he bought for $44 billion last year. Yaccarino is a highly respected advertising […]<\/p>\n
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