Elon Musk’s pick of Linda Yaccarino to take over as CEO of Twitter and recently departed Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s plan to move to the platform highlight the world’s wealthiest man’s twin goals of both expanding the breadth of opinion on the platform and making Twitter profitable.
Twitter was only sporadically profitable before Musk took the company private, but it lost roughly 70% of its top 100 advertisers in the months after the acquisition. An update late last year to investors indicated a 40% loss of adjusted earnings. Musk is under pressure to repay the $13 billion of debt he incurred with his $44 billion purchase, which created $1.5 billion in yearly interest payments. After slashing staff and trimming contractors, Musk says the platform is on track to break even soon.
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But hiring a veteran advertising executive like Yaccarino may result in the biggest boon to Twitter’s bottom line yet.
Characteristically, Musk made the announcement on the platform, tweeting, “I am excited to welcome Linda Yaccarino as the new CEO of Twitter!” Musk will shift to serving as executive chairman and chief technology officer of the social media company.
Yaccarino leaves her post as chairwoman of global advertising and partnerships at NBCUniversal after more than a decade in that role. She currently chairs the Advertising Council’s board of directors, a World Economic Forum task force, and a British talent management group. She has 30 years of advertising experience and is credited with integrating and digitizing ads across multiple platforms while at NBCUniversal.
Yaccarino tweeted in response to Musk, “I’ve long been inspired by your vision to create a brighter future. I’m excited to help bring this vision to Twitter and transform this business together!”
Yaccarino interviewed Musk onstage at a marketing convention just last month, where they discussed many of the issues she’ll now be tasked with navigating in her new CEO role at Twitter. She asked Musk about the inherent tension between allowing more controversial content on the platform and attracting more revenue from advertisers, who are concerned about their ads appearing next to potentially off-putting user-generated posts.
Musk responded by describing Twitter’s content moderation policy as “freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach.” In practice, that means Twitter aims to keep more content up but might choose not to promote or otherwise amplify posts that likely offend most users. When Yaccarino pressed Musk on “de-risking” the platform for advertisers, he pointed to new “adjacency controls” that prevent the ad engine from placing ads next to user content to which advertisers might object.
Another example of Musk’s competing commitment to expanding the diversity of viewpoints on the platform and making it profitable is highly rated and recently ousted Tucker Carlson’s plan to use Twitter to distribute a “new version of his show.” The details of what a television show translated onto a microblogging social media site would look like remain unknown. But the cable host embodies the promise of big audiences to lure advertising dollars and the risks of driving advertisers away for fear of his often-provocative commentary.
Carlson was abruptly dismissed from his top-rated opinion show on Fox News for reasons still somewhat unclear. Up until then, he drew an average of 3.25 million nightly viewers and was the network’s prime-time ratings leader. Accordingly, Carlson’s show generated $77.5 million in advertising revenue in 2022, according to advertising services company Vivvix.
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How and if those audiences and those advertising revenues might follow Carlson from cable’s Fox News to Twitter remains a question for Yaccarino to answer in her new role.
But Musk might have already given his new CEO a clue onstage last month. When she asked him about being open to feedback from potential advertisers, he responded pointedly, “It’s totally cool to say that you want to have your advertising appear in certain places in Twitter and not in other places, but it is not cool to try to say what Twitter will do.” He continued pointedly, “And if that means losing advertising dollars, we lose it. But freedom of speech is paramount.”
