Months after Twitter users voted to have Elon Musk step down from the company as CEO, he revealed earlier this week that he had finally found a replacement for the position, with today seeing him announce that Linda Yaccarino would be taking over as CEO. Yaccarino most recently held the position of Chairman of Global Advertising and Partnerships at NBCUniversal, a position which she resigned from on Friday. It would seem that a key component in finding a replacement would be to enlist new paths of revenue, with Yaccarino’s experience in ad sales possibly bringing with it not only a surge in profits, but also a potential shift in the culture of the social media platform.
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“I am excited to welcome Linda Yaccarino as the new CEO of Twitter!” Musk posted on Twitter. “[Yaccarino] will focus primarily on business operations, while I focus on product design & new technology. Looking forward to working with Linda to transform this platform into X, the everything app.”
Musk’s comments about the “everything app” are likely in regards to posts he recently shared in which he seemed to endorse the idea of integrating business elements into the platform, akin to LinkedIn, as well as potential dating elements.
As any longtime Twitter user can tell you, it’s been a wild ride since Musk took ownership of the platform late last year, especially given how few changes had been made to the concept since its debut in the late 2000s. One of the biggest initiatives is an all-new verification system, which was not only met with pushback conceptually, but also in its implementation.
Under the previous ownership, Twitter would offer “notable” users the verified badge, with the users being public figures, influencers, members of the government, journalists, or anyone else the organization thought merited distinction. In hopes of earning more of a profit from Twitter, Musk offered the badge to anyone who would pay $8 for Twitter Blue, a service that came with other features. Musk then stripped all previously verified users of their badge, calling that verification system into question, with a number of celebrities with massive followings refusing to pay for a service that was previously free. Twitter then made the update that any notable account with more than one million followers, as well as governmental authorities or businesses, would earn the checkmark and that badge would be a specific color.
Given how active Musk is on the platform himself, this is only one major hurdle the company has tackled in the months since he took ownership, with there being countless other instances of users having issues with the new direction of the platform.
Stay tuned for updates on Yaccarino taking over as CEO.
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