Linda Jaccarino, Elon Musk’s chosen successor as CEO of Twitter, announced on Monday night that she has officially stepped into the role, nearly a month after the South African billionaire announced that he had found a replacement, Reuters reported.

“It happened – the first day is over!” Yaccarino wrote on Twitter, without elaborating.

Jaccarino, a former head of marketing at NBCUniversal, leads the social media company as it struggles to reverse a sharp decline in advertising revenue and faces growing threats of a possible ban in the European Union.

Musk, who served as Twitter’s CEO after ousting the company shortly after he officially took over in late October last year, said Jaccarino would help build “everything around apps.”

The South African billionaire announced on May 11 that he had found a replacement as Twitter’s CEO, nearly six months after his followers on the social network suggested he step down following a poll he initiated.

Another former NBCUniversal executive, Joe Benarrock, also joined Twitter on Monday. At NBC, he coordinated communications strategy for advertising and partnerships, reporting to Jaccarino.

Who is Linda Jaccarino, the new CEO of Twitter

Jaccarino came from a family of Italian origin. Jaccarino has built her entire career in television, initially spending 20 years at Time Warner Group, which later became Warner Bros. Discovery.

“I fell in love with television content at a very young age,” she said in a 2021 episode of the Great Minds podcast.

“I really thought that I would be engaged in television production (…) I wanted to create a new “Sesame Street” – a children’s TV show that is extremely popular in the USA.

As a student at Penn State University, she discovered the world of economics in the audiovisual sector and became fascinated with content monetization, an interest that shaped her professional path.

NBCUniversal, a subsidiary of cable operator Comcast, has radically changed its advertising strategy to accompany the transition of video production from traditional television to streaming platforms.

Linda Jaccarino integrated all the stations and channels of the group into a single platform to facilitate and rationalize advertising costs.

She also focused on audience and ad performance metrics to allow companies to more effectively measure the impact of their advertising campaigns.

How Elon Musk managed to give up the head of Twitter

On December 18 last year, the South African billionaire launched a poll on his Twitter page asking his nearly 130 million followers whether he should step down as CEO of Twitter.

On October 30, just two days after completing the acquisition of the social media platform, Elon Musk announced that he would also be taking on its top leadership role after one of the first moves he made at Twitter was to fire Parag Agrawal, the former CEO of the company, Chief Financial Officer (CFO) Ned Segal and Head of Legal and Corporate Policy Vijay Gadde.

Musk previously accused the three of misleading him and Twitter investors about the number of fake accounts on the platform.

More than 17 million users of the social media platform voted in a poll conducted by Musk in December, with 57.5% of respondents favoring his departure from the company. The result came after Musk made several controversial decisions on Twitter, prompting a mass exodus of the company’s employees as well as some of its users.

After the poll ended, the South African billionaire said he would respect its results, as he did with another poll conducted on Twitter last year regarding the decision to sell Tesla shares.

“I will resign as CEO as soon as I find someone crazy enough to take the job! After that, I will only lead the software and server teams,” Musk announced on December 21, 2022.