Twitter's majority shareholder had already announced the day before that he had hired a woman to lead the company, saying he would become "executive chairman of the board and chief technology officer, overseeing products, software and operations."

Earlier Friday, NBCUniversal issued a statement saying Linda Yaccarino had resigned from her position.

During her twelve years at this subsidiary of the cable operator Comcast, she helped unify all of the group's media within a single advertising platform in order to simplify the offer to advertisers. It has also worked to improve advertising effectiveness indicators.

With a career of more than 30 years in television advertising (she also went through the Turner group), she should bring to the social network experience, but also an address book provided, at a time when Twitter suffers from a disengagement of advertisers.

"The all-purpose app"

Since Elon Musk took control of Twitter in October, many have disengaged, scalded by the hussar-style management of the fiery billionaire, as well as uncertainties about content moderation.

In particular, it has fired more than two-thirds of employees, let back controversial figures who had been banned from the network and upset the authentication system of accounts.

Linda Yaccarino on stage at a content conference in New York in 2016 © D Dipasupil / GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA/AFP/Archives

The boss of Tesla and SpaceX had done a survey in December to ask users of the platform whether or not to sell the site. Some 17 million of them had voted, 57% of whom were in favour of his departure.

After some hesitation - he had insinuated that this result was the result of an army of automated accounts - Elon Musk had finally tweeted that he planned to leave as soon as he had "found someone crazy enough" to succeed him.

"I'm looking forward to working with Linda to turn this platform into X, the all-purpose app," he said Friday.

The billionaire rebranded the company "X Corp" last month. He regularly talks about his nebulous plan to make Twitter a multi-faceted application, with financial services, such as WeChat in China.

Linda Yaccarino interviewed him a few weeks ago at a marketing conference in Miami. Asked about the situation within Twitter since the acquisition, he replied: "It's going well... It's entertaining... It's a disaster sometimes."

© 2023 AFP