Elon Musk appoints Linda Yaccarino as Twitter CEO

By: WE Staff | Tuesday, 16 May 2023

Elon Musk has maintained his promise to stand aside as Twitter's CEO by appointing professional media marketing specialist Linda Yaccarino as the social media giant's new CEO as he transitions from a six-month code review to rebuild the company's revenue base.

Linda made her new stance public and requested feedback from users and other groups. Elon Musk's "vision to create a brighter future" inspired her, she said. "I am excited to help bring that vision to Twitter and transform the business together," she added. Please keep talking as we collaboratively develop Twitter 2.0.

Linda will start working at the end of June and "focus primarily on business operations," according to Elon, who made the long-awaited announcement. Linda spent nearly 20 years in senior advertising and marketing roles with broadcast giant Turner Broadcasting System (TBS) and 11 years managing ad strategy with NBCUniversal Media.

Elon reaffirmed his frequently stated intentions to transform the platform into a multifocal app ecosystem, emulating China's TenCent, whose WeChat ecosystem has hundreds of millions of users accessing a vast array of linked services. According to Elon, "working with Linda to transform [Twitter] into X, the everything app," is something he is looking forward to.

Elon called it "crazy" that content creators would use Twitter to enhance traffic to their YouTube videos because that is how they make a living in a town hall meeting after buying Twitter for $61 billion (US$44 billion) late last year.

Users of WeChat in China "basically live on it because it's so useful and helpful to your daily life," Elon said at the time. And I would consider it a big achievement if Twitter could help us achieve that goal or even get close to it.

Recent rumours asserting that Twitter's corporate ownership structure had been changed and that Elon had joined Twitter with a Delaware shell business called X Corp provide evidence that his ambitious plan is progressing.

Elon also owns the domain name X.com, which was formerly linked to an early attempt at online banking that would ultimately develop into PayPal.