Linda Yaccarino, who on Friday left her position as ad sales chief for NBCUniversal, has touted her efforts to “fight social justice and equity” at Comcast, saying the company “thought they were doing enough” to bring diverse representation to the company, “but clearly we weren’t.”
Musk had said in December he would step down as chief executive as soon as he found someone “foolish enough to take the job”. He confirmed on Thursday that the wait was over, tweeting: “Excited to announce that I’ve hired a new CEO for X/Twitter. She will be starting in ~6 weeks!”
Musk did not name Yaccarino in the initial post, but on Friday, NBCUniversal, the entertainment conglomerate behind the NBC TV network and the Universal film studio, announced that Yaccarino had left the business without revealing her onward destination. Musk’s confirmation came soon afterwards.
Yaccarino, whose official title will be chairman of global advertising and partnerships, is active on Twitter and has almost 19,000 followers. Her most recent tweets focused largely on NBC programming and NBC’s ad-supported Peacock streaming service, which she played a key role in launching.
She interviewed Musk on stage at an advertising conference in Miami last month, in which she told the Tesla CEO that some advertisers “have a challenge with your points of view”, to which Musk replied that some of his tweets should be taken with a “grain of salt”. Yaccarino also said in the interview: “If freedom of speech, as he says, is the bedrock of this country, I’m not sure there’s anyone in this room who could disagree with that.”
In April, Yaccarino tweeted a clip from an interview between Musk and the comedian Bill Maher on the HBO show Real Time Bill Maher, in which she tagged Musk with an “on fire” emoji. In the clip, Musk is asked by Maher about the “woke mind virus”, prompting Musk to state that the world needed to be “cautious” about anything that is “anti-meritocratic” and “results in the suppression of free speech”.
In one clip, recorded just months after the death of George Floyd, Yaccarino boasts of a $100 million fund set aside by Comcast to “direct funds to the right organizations” while “confronting editorial bias” in its NBC news division by ensuring all reporters were comprised of “50 percent women and 50 percent people of color.”
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