So Elon finally found someone else to sit in the big chair at Twitter. Wednesday he tweeted that he'd hired a new CEO and that she'd be starting in about six weeks, then followed up naming her: Linda Yaccarino, who until this week was NBCUniversal's head of global advertising and partnerships. If you don't follow the ad industry side of media that name might mean nothing to you, but she's basically the person who's spent years running the room where TV networks convince Coke and Procter & Gamble to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on commercials. Which, once you think about it for two seconds, is exactly the skill set Twitter is missing right now.
Here's the detail that made me laugh out loud when I read it: this happened during upfronts week. That's the annual ritual where every network parades its fall lineup in front of advertisers in a hotel ballroom in New York, trying to lock in ad commitments for the year. Yaccarino was, as far as anyone can tell, supposed to be on that stage for NBCUniversal days after this news broke. Announcing you've poached the industry's top ad saleswoman in the middle of the one week a year when every ad buyer on the planet is sitting in the same room is either a genius flex or an incredibly petty one. Possibly both. Knowing Musk, I'm guessing both.
I'm not going to pretend this is some kind of shocking pivot, because it isn't really. Since the takeover last October, the single biggest wound Twitter has is advertiser flight. Half of the top 100 advertisers reportedly stopped spending entirely at some point over the last several months, spooked by the layoffs, the content moderation whiplash, the blue checkmark chaos back in April where anyone could buy verification for eight bucks a month and brands watched fake "official" accounts impersonate them within hours. You don't fix that with an engineer. You fix that, or at least you try to, with someone who can sit across the table from a CMO and make them feel safe spending money again. That's a sales job, not a product job, and hiring a 20-year ad sales veteran instead of another product or engineering lead tells you exactly which problem Musk thinks is the actual emergency.
What it doesn't tell you is whether the product problem is going to get any attention at all. My own timeline the last few months has been a mess of crypto bots, engagement-bait replies, and randomly resurfaced tweets from accounts I don't follow because the algorithm decided I needed to see them. I muted about fifteen keywords last month just to make the app usable again during my morning coffee. None of that gets fixed by a new ad chief, no matter how good she is at her old job. Somebody still has to actually run the day to day of the site, decide what "freedom of speech not freedom of reach" means in practice, deal with the moderation queue, keep the servers up after cutting the infrastructure team down to a skeleton crew. It's not obvious from the outside that this hire touches any of that, and Musk's own past comments suggest he plans to stay on as executive chair and CTO, which is a fairly generous way of saying he's not actually leaving.
I also can't shake the fact that Yaccarino is walking into this with her eyes open. Shes not naive about what she's signing up for, an incredibly online guy publicly musing about the "will of the people" every other week, a platform that half of Madison Avenue currently treats as radioactive, revenue that by most outside estimates has fallen by a third or more since the deal closed last fall. If she can get the ad money to come back even partway, that's a genuinely hard job done well. If she can't, she's about to become the most visible face of a very public failure, while the guy who actually owns the place keeps posting memes from the sidelines.
Anyway. I'll believe the "six weeks" timeline when I see it, mostly because every Twitter timeline Musk has given since April of last year has slipped at least once. Worth checking back on this one in July.