Linda Yaccarino

Yaccarino graduated from Pennsylvania State University, earning a bachelor’s degree in telecommunications in 1985.⁠[1][2]

She then spent about 20 years in advertising sales and marketing at the cable television group Turner, ultimately serving as executive vice president and chief operating officer of advertising sales, marketing and acquisitions at Turner Entertainment. She was responsible for all advertising sales, sales marketing and program acquisitions for networks including TNT, TBS and truTV, and oversaw program acquisitions for the sister networks TCM, Cartoon Network and Adult Swim. She was a principal architect of Turner’s “broadcast replacement” initiative and helped develop and enhance the contextual advertising platform inContext, which aimed to place the right ad in the right place at the right time.⁠[3][4][4][4][4]

In late October 2011, Yaccarino left Turner for a “new professional opportunity”; a week later, on October 31, NBCUniversal named her president of cable entertainment and digital advertising sales, replacing Dave Cassaro, who had been pushed out, and reporting jointly to Bonnie Hammer, chairman of cable entertainment and cable studios, and Lauren Zalaznick, chairman of entertainment and digital networks. She was responsible for all advertising sales for cable networks including USA, Syfy, Bravo, E! and Oxygen and their digital platforms, and oversaw sales for sites such as NBC.com, NBCSports.com and GolfChannel.com and for standalone digital businesses such as Fandango and iVillage. It was the company where she had started as a college intern.⁠[4][4][4][4][4][5]

By 2014, Yaccarino had risen to president of advertising sales at NBCUniversal, overseeing all advertising sales and market strategy for the company’s broadcast, cable and digital properties. On May 10 that year, she delivered the commencement address for Penn State’s College of Communications.⁠[1][1]

On October 24, 2017, Yaccarino, then chairman of advertising sales and client partnerships at NBCUniversal, spoke at Penn State’s Penn State Forum speaker series on “Navigating the Future of a Fragmented Industry.” She oversaw advertising sales for NBCUniversal’s entire television portfolio, including two broadcast networks, 17 cable networks and more than 50 digital properties; her “one portfolio” plan combined the company’s broadcast, cable and digital assets into a single sales organization. In her talk she said television, like online advertising, would deliver the right ad in the right place at the right time, so viewers would see fewer and more relevant commercials.⁠[6][6][6][6][6][6][6]

On May 4, 2018, U.S. President Trump named Yaccarino and others to two-year terms on the President’s Council on Sports, Fitness and Nutrition. She had overseen NBCUniversal’s advertising sales during the last three seasons of Celebrity Apprentice, hosted by Trump; the appointment was announced hours after Trump attacked NBCNBCNBC (National Broadcasting Company) is an American national commercial broadcast television network. It was founded by RCA in 1926, began as a radio network and later developed television. With ABC and CBS it is one of the three traditional U.S. broadcast networks; it passed to General Electric with RCA in 1986, merged with Universal to form NBCUniversal in 2004, has been controlled by Comcast since 2011, and is one of the five networks that rotate in the White House television pool.Open the full entry on Twitter.⁠[7][7][7]

On October 12, 2020, NBCUniversal announced that Yaccarino had been elevated to chairman of global advertising and partnerships, continuing to report directly to chief executive officer Jeff Shell. In addition to national advertising sales, ad sales marketing and global partnerships, she took on local advertising sales and the strategic initiatives team and led a new cross-functional data strategy effort across the company. The company said that since joining in 2011 she had grown its advertising sales nationally and globally into a business of more than $10 billion a year.⁠[8][9][8][8][8]

On January 6, 2021, Yaccarino was named chair of the board of the public-service advertising organization Ad Council, succeeding Facebook chief revenue officer David Fischer, for a term through June 30, 2022; she had joined its board in 2014, become a member of its executive committee in 2015, and most recently served as vice chair. Her priority as chair was public education about coronavirus vaccines and pandemic safety measures.⁠[10][10][10]

In April 2023, Yaccarino appeared on stage with Elon Musk at an industry conference in Miami, moderating a session titled “Twitter 2.0: From Conversations to Partnerships.” She pressed him on whether the platform had reduced the risk of ads appearing next to hateful content, and Musk replied that Twitter had “adjacency controls” letting advertisers avoid negative content.⁠[11][5][11][11]

On May 12, 2023, Yaccarino announced that she was leaving her post as chairman of global advertising and partnerships at NBCUniversal after more than 11 years there, saying it had been “an absolute honor” to be part of Comcast NBCUniversal and lead its team. The same day, Elon Musk announced on Twitter that she would become Twitter’s chief executive officer, focusing primarily on business operations while he focused on product design and new technology and became executive chairman and chief technology officer. In a poll Musk launched in December 2022, users had voted for him to step down as head of Twitter.⁠[5][5][5][12][12][13][14]

She took over a Twitter facing an advertiser exodus, service disruptions, regulatory scrutiny and growing competition after Musk’s acquisition; advertising had accounted for more than 90% of the company’s revenue. At NBCUniversal she had led a global team of about 2,000 people and forged partnerships with new media companies including Twitter, Apple News, BuzzFeed, Snapchat and YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry.⁠[5][5][5][5]

In June 2023, Yaccarino formally took office, about three weeks earlier than the roughly six weeks Musk had indicated when announcing her appointment; she posted on Twitter, “first day in the books!” Shortly afterward, Twitter was renamed X.⁠[15][15][16][17][18]

In August 2023, Yaccarino gave her first public interview as chief executive, to CNBCCNBCCNBC is an American business and financial news cable channel launched by NBC in 1989; it merged with its rival FNN in 1991 and since January 2026 has been part of Versant Media Group, spun off from Comcast.Open the full entry; she said many advertisers had returned and that the company was “close to break-even,” and promoted X’s “freedom of speech, not freedom of reach” policy of limiting the reach of lawful but harmful content and keeping brand ads away from it. She also announced that “Sensitivity Settings” were live globally in the X Ads Manager.⁠[18][18][18]

Less than a week later, on August 16, the media watchdog Media Matters for America published a report that ads for mainstream brands such as Adobe and Gilead Sciences had run alongside an X account celebrating Hitler and the Nazi Party, and at least two brands said they would suspend advertising on X.⁠[18][18][18][18]

In mid-November 2023, Musk posted on X in a way that appeared to endorse antisemitic conspiracy theories; Media Matters then published an article finding major companies’ ads alongside pro-Nazi content, and major advertisers such as Apple, Disney and IBM paused spending on X. After Musk’s post, Yaccarino emphasized the platform’s “efforts to combat antisemitism and discrimination,” and sent employees a company-wide memo titled “Our Work Is Meaningful,” saying some advertisers had “temporarily paused investments” because of a “misleading and manipulated article,” but that “the data will tell the real story.” Advertising-industry figures were by then urging her to resign.⁠[19][19][19][11][19][19][19]

On November 20, X sued Media Matters and its senior investigative reporter Eric Hananoki in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, accusing them of manufacturing images of ads beside extremist content and misrepresenting what typical users experience. That evening Yaccarino posted that not a single authentic user on X had seen IBM’s, Comcast’s or Oracle’s ads next to the content in the article. Media Matters president Angelo Carusone called it a “frivolous lawsuit” meant to bully critics and said the group would fight it in court.⁠[20][20][20][20][20][20][20]

On January 31, 2024, Yaccarino appeared as chief executive officer of X Corp.XX (X Corp.) is the company that operates the social platform of the same name, carrying on Twitter’s public conversation service; its main businesses include advertising, business promotion, and paid subscriptions.Open the full entry, alongside the chief executives of Meta, Snap, TikTok and Discord, at the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee hearing “Big Tech and the Online Child Sexual Exploitation Crisis.” In her written testimony she said X had zero tolerance for child sexual exploitation; in 2023 it suspended 12.4 million accounts for violating its related policies (up from 2.3 million in 2022) and sent 850,000 reports to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC); users aged 13 to 17 made up less than 1% of X’s U.S. daily users; and the company was building a trust and safety center in Austin, Texas, to hire more in-house agents.⁠[21][21][21][22][22][22][22][22][22][22]

In August 2024, Yaccarino said in a video that members of the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM), a brand-safety initiative run by the World Federation of Advertisers, had “conspired to boycott X,” threatening the company’s future; X then sued GARM in federal court in Texas, naming four members, CVS, Unilever, Mars and the Danish energy company Ørsted, as defendants and alleging they had organized to collectively withhold billions of dollars in advertising. Days later GARM announced it was discontinuing its activities because the allegations had caused a distraction and drained its resources, though it said it would still defend itself in court; Yaccarino posted that “no small group should be able to monopolize what gets monetized.”⁠[23][23][23][23][23][23][23][23][23]

On July 9, 2025, Yaccarino announced on X that she was stepping down as chief executive officer. She thanked Musk for entrusting her with protecting free speech, turning the company around and transforming X into the “Everything App,” cited work on user safety, especially for children, restoring advertiser confidence, and products such as Community Notes and the forthcoming X Money, and said X was entering a new chapter with xAI. Musk replied, “Thank you for your contributions.”⁠[24][24][24][24][24][25]

Her departure came one day after X’s Grok chatbot began posting antisemitic tropes, and it was not clear whether the events were connected; months earlier, Musk had sold X to his artificial intelligence company xAI. Days before she stepped down, Nikita BierNikita BierNikita Bier is an American entrepreneur and product manager known for developing tbh and Gas, anonymous compliment-polling apps for teenagers, which were acquired by Facebook, Inc. (now Meta) and Discord in 2017 and 2023, respectively. He announced on June 30, 2025, that he had become head of product at the social media platform X, stepped down in August 2026, and said in October of that year that he had officially left X.Open the full entry had been appointed to lead product at X.⁠[26][26][27]

On August 5, 2025, Yaccarino was named chief executive officer of eMed Population Health, a Miami-based telehealth company that started during the pandemic in 2020 offering Covid testing services and later moved into dispensing GLP-1 weight-loss medications such as Wegovy and Ozempic. She was to work on partnerships with more national and global employers and with governments; she said the healthcare industry had been disrupted by technology but not yet completely transformed by it, and that there was an opportunity to combine technology, lifestyle and data in new ways.⁠[3][28][28][3][28][28]

In 2011, Adweek named Yaccarino one of the “Ten Most Powerful Women in TV” and BusinessWeek named her a “CEO of Tomorrow”; she has also been named to The Hollywood Reporter’s Women in Entertainment Power 100, and ranked 58th on Fortune’s 2023 Most Powerful Women list.⁠[1][6][14]

She has long been active in WICT (Women in Cable Telecommunications) and has served on the Dean’s Advancement Council of Penn State’s Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications; she supports the college as a donor and volunteer and helped its annual job fair, Success in the City, find a home in New York City.⁠[6][6][1][1]

X: Public account: https://x.com/lindayaX (opens in a new window)⁠[29][25]