Illustration by Scott Brundage
When Elon Musk announced last May that he was naming Linda Yaccarino the CEO of the company that I will always call Twitter, few people outside of the media business had any idea who she was. By now, just a few months later, the former head of advertising at NBCUniversal has become a lightning rod for rage arising from Musk’s erratic, impulsive and, in many cases, repulsive behavior, even as he has made it all but impossible for her to fulfill the mission of making Twitter an alluring place for advertisers.
Through it all, Yaccarino has generally presented herself as oblivious to Musk’s conduct and its impact on the company that she at least nominally leads — behavior so maddening that she has been dragged on the very platform she supposedly runs.
According to those who have worked for or with Yaccarino in the past, the Twitter job gave her an opportunity to fulfill a long-standing ambition: to rise to the level of CEO. And they say they believe her self-regard is such that she thought she could manage Musk despite his well-established reputation as an agent of chaos. Having found that she is unable to do so, these sources say, it’s nothing new for Yaccarino to insist on presenting matters as she would like them to be, trying to choose her own adventure despite the very obvious obstacles in the way. (Yaccarino declined to comment for this article.)
This is where I pause to disclose that I have tweeted at or about both Musk and Yaccarino at times when Musk’s behavior has reached a new apex of toxicity and her response, or lack of one, has remained exasperatingly obtuse. After various Musk emanations, I would tag Yaccarino in a tweet, asking, “Does this make advertisers feel safe?” When Yaccarino made a disastrous appearance at the Code conference in September, I felt the same incredulity as many others as she dodged questions about Musk’s behavior. (CNN’s Reliable Sources newsletter observed that she had seemed “totally untethered from reality.”) At the time, Musk was threatening to sue the Anti-Defamation League for allegedly costing the site ad dollars. Yaccarino said she wished that were different but expressed disappointment that the ADL did not acknowledge “all the progress” the platform had supposedly made in combating antisemitism. I fired off an angry tweet: “This woman is either extremely stupid or mentally unwell.”
Since then, Yaccarino has hardly been able to improve the perception of Twitter among advertisers; as Musk ramped up his invective, companies like NBCU, Apple and Disney have fled in droves. Even Paris Hilton’s entertainment company suspended its ad campaign on the site, a month after announcing an exclusive partnership with Twitter involving live video and commerce. (“The queen of pop culture, music, business and TV is #Sliving on X,” Yaccarino tweeted at the time.)
Yaccarino was even the subject of a Nov. 20 sketch on Jimmy Kimmel Live. After mentioning the troubles engulfing the site, Kimmel said he decided to check in with the CEO. “Everything’s going great,” the woman playing Yaccarino said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
By now, Yaccarino has become one of the best-known CEOs in America, if not for the most desirable reasons. Amid all the noise and controversy, prominent voting-rights attorney Marc Elias posted: “I had never heard of Linda Yaccarino before her joining X, but was she this ridiculous in her last job?”
According to many former associates at NBCU, the answer is a qualified no. Though several describe her as a difficult and volatile boss or colleague, they say she was an extremely hardworking and capable ad-sales executive. Advertisers — who she was, of course, always courting — also praise her. In mid-November, after Forbes reported that marketing leaders were urging Yaccarino to resign, Axios quoted Lou Paskalis, founder and CEO of marketing consultancy AJL Advisory, saying that “the advertising community is now working to save the reputation of a beloved member of our industry who does not share Elon Musk’s views.”
In fact, it’s unclear what Yaccarino thinks of Musk’s views; after his Nov. 15 tweet endorsing an antisemitic trope as “the actual truth,” she touted the site’s “efforts to combat antisemitism and discrimination.” (Her views on Donald Trump are much clearer. Associates say she was an enthusiastic supporter. She was appointed to the President’s Council on Sport, Fitness and Nutrition during his administration.)
Based on conversations with multiple sources who worked with or for Yaccarino at NBCU, the word “beloved” is not one that many would use to describe the way she was seen internally. “She was good at ad sales but wrecked the culture,” says a former insider. “She was not collegial. She was a scorched-earth manager.” Sources say there were many hirings, firings and reorganizations. “Stability is so important for success, but her reign was marked by instability,” says another source. “You could count on a reorganization once or twice a year.”
Multiple former associates say Yaccarino sometimes seemed to have an elastic relationship to facts at the company. When communicating with her, says one, “You had to not only send her an email but copy other people [because] even though she had it, she would deny it.” At times, the reason for the confusion seemed understandable, this person continues: “Her organization was so big, she had so many direct reports. She took on too much. She didn’t know how to delegate.”
In dealings with the advertising community, former associates say, Yaccarino was free to make claims that no one was going to vet for accuracy. One example: In 2018, NBC announced that it would cut the number of ads on its TV networks by 20 percent and charge advertisers a premium for the remaining spots. After ad giant Dentsu complained that the commercial load had not been cut as promised, Yaccarino responded by icing the agency for months.
“She quite adeptly navigated that world of alternative facts,” says one former associate, adding that at Twitter, the public will “parse every word and she’s never had to deal with that.” Says another source: “She was in a very protected bubble at NBC. Her image was very carefully scripted. Her whole life was a press strategy.”
Several of Yaccarino’s former associates say she was determined to rise to the level of chief executive, which was clearly not going to happen at NBCU. “I don’t think she has the skill set to be CEO,” a former colleague says. “She can’t do a simple mission statement. She’s not transparent. She doesn’t have the facts at hand. She doesn’t create a positive culture. She takes pushback personally.”
Though it would seem obvious that Musk could be more than a handful, a former colleague says her “ego was as big as the building in which we worked. I really do believe that she felt she could manage him.” Another NBCU veteran concurs: “She let her ego get the best of her. She thought she could control him. It was a level of ego and hubris that you rarely see.”
In April, a month before she was hired, Yaccarino interviewed Musk at an industry conference in Miami. “She had the entire staff prepping for that for at least a few weeks prior,” says an NBCU insider. “I think she felt that was an audition for working for him.” (At one point she asked, “Have you de-risked the opportunity or chance of [advertisers’] campaigns landing in these awful, hateful places?” Musk responded that Twitter had “adjacency controls” that enabled marketers to block their ads from appearing next to “anything that is remotely negative.”)
The meticulous preparation for the Miami event was not repeated a few months later, when Yaccarino, as the CEO of Twitter, stepped onstage for the Code conference for an interview with CNBC’s Julia Boorstin. “The Code conference thing was an unmitigated disaster,” says a former NBCU exec. “Linda was used to speaking to people about subjects that she knew cold. She can talk about advertising forever. She got up at Code thinking she could charm people. She just decided to wing it and it was really bad.” Afterward, this person says, “She was kind of despondent. She said, ‘I thought it would be a friendly forum. I’ve known Julia for years. Yeah, I wanted to feed my ego a little bit. It was just a mistake.’ ”
The bad news for Twitter has only intensified the days following Musk’s incendiary Nov. 15 tweet bolstering an antisemitic trope. (Whether his recent jaunt to Israel will change anything remains to be seen.) The New York Times reported that an internal document revealed that more than 100 brands had “fully paused” their ads while dozens of others were “at risk,” potentially leading to a $75 million loss by the end of the year. (The company disputed the accuracy of those figures.) The paper reported that in a meeting with staff, Yaccarino didn’t mention Musk’s post, and blamed the company’s problems on a report from watchdog group Media Matters alleging that ads from companies like IBM and Apple appeared next to posts promoting white nationalist and Nazi content. Twitter has now sued Media Matters.
After Yaccarino tweeted disputing that ads had been placed alongside pro-Nazi content, tech journalist Kara Swisher tweeted, “Denial is not a river in…oh never mind, she’s lost the narrative completely.”
But an NBCU executive observing the chaos says Yaccarino’s see-no-evil stance is what he would expect. “In her mind, she’s committed to this,” he says. “I’ve seen commentary that she needs to leave. She’s not listening to any of that. She has this way of blocking out the negative and almost speaking her mantra until it becomes the truth. Or she thinks it’s the truth.”
Alex Weprin contributed to this report.
A version of this story first appeared in the Nov. 29 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe
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