Linda Yaccarino Defends Elon Musk, Asks Who Wouldn’t Want Him “Sitting By Their Side?”
28.09.2023 - 03:27
/ deadline.com
Linda Yaccarino spoke glowingly of Elon Musk, said X will turn a profit in early 2024, and insisted the platform formerly known as Twitter has made major progress in reversing lagging metrics in her 100 days as CEO.
In an interview at Vox Media’s annual CODE conference, she pushed back on the assumption that she was hired solely to placate advertisers. She addressed the recent controversy with the ADL and also got into it with Yael Roth, the former head of safety at Twitter, who spoke at the same event earlier in the day.
Yaccarino, the longtime ad executive and former advertising chief at NBCUniversal, joined Twitter in June and, in fact, began to woo back advertisers who had been spooked by a geyser of negative content that erupted after Musk acquired the social media platform a year ago and took it private. He then renamed it X.
Musk recently Tweet-floated a plan to start charging all X users a monthly subscription fee. CNBC’s Julia Boorstin asked if he’d consulted her first on that. “We talk about everything,” Yaccarino said. Adding, “Do you think Elon brought me to the company to be the head of advertising?” alone. Yes, it’s a big part of her experience, but, she said, “I think my background is being a very senior executive.”
The product team does not report to her but to Musk but the exec said the structure doesn’t matter. “Who wouldn’t want Elon Musk sitting by their side?” There was some laughter from the audience and Boorstin said, “l see a show of hands.”
There’s been a lot of X-related matter swirling lately, from Walter Isaacson’s biography of Elon Musk, to a long FT interview with Yaccarino yesterday. Today, The Information reported that Musk had cut half of his election integrity team. Yaccarino called