Who is Linda Yaccarino? the former head of ad sales for NBCUniversal, will be Twitter’s next CEO

Elon Musk said Friday that Linda Yaccarino, the former head of ad sales for NBCUniversal, will be Twitter’s next CEO.

Musk tweeted the news just hours after NBCUniversal said Yaccarino was leaving the company.

Musk said Yaccarino “will focus primarily on business operations, while I focus on product design & new technology.”

Who is Linda Yaccarino, Elon Musk’s pick for Twitter CEO?

Yaccarino is chairman of global advertising and partnerships at NBCUniversal, where she oversees 2,000 workers on a team that has generated more than $100 billion in ad sales, according to her profile on the company’s website. Her team has forged partnerships with Apple News, BuzzFeed, Snapchat and Twitter, among others. Word of her talks with Musk come at a potentially awkward time, as Yaccarino is scheduled to address major NBCUniversal clients on Monday at the company’s “upfront,” an event intended to attract advertisers.

Some Musk fans have zeroed in on Yaccarino’s work with the World Economic Forum, an organization of political power brokers and global business leaders that Musk has criticized, as a sign that she will return Twitter to its old ways or tamp down on Musk’s free-speech initiatives. At the WEF, which promotes globalization and hosts the annual Davos forum, she serves as chairman on the Taskforce on the Future of Work and sits on a committee for media, entertainment and culture, according to her LinkedIn profile.

Responding to some of those concerns in a tweet, Musk said that the platform’s “commitment to open source transparency and accepting a wide range of viewpoints remains unchanged.”

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In 2018, Yaccarino was appointed by President Donald Trump to serve a two-year term on his Council on Sports Fitness and Nutrition. As Ad Council chair, Yaccarino also partnered with the Biden White House in 2021 to create a coronavirus vaccine campaign featuring Pope Francis.

Musk and Yaccarino have collaborated previously. The pair appeared onstage together in Miami Beach last month for a talk called “Twitter 2.0: From Conversations to Partnerships,” which was advertised as an “intimate conversation” about Twitter’s role in culture and its future for marketers. NBCUniversal also recently expanded its partnership with Twitter for the 2024 Paris Olympics, a move Yaccarino alluded to in a tweet to Musk last week.

A graduate of Pennsylvania State University, Yaccarino got her start in the media industry as an intern at NBCUniversal’s media planning department, where, she told Salesforce, her “love affair” with media began. She spent nearly two decades in advertising, marketing and acquisitions at Turner before moving back to NBC, where she’s worked for more than a decade.