Linda Yaccarino took the reins as Twitter’s new CEO earlier than expected on Monday — and hired a former colleague at NBCUniversal as she scrambles to prop up ad revenue that has reportedly plunged 59% this year.
Yaccarino took the reins from billionaire Elon Musk as Twitter’s boss about three weeks earlier than expected, and is already building out her team, with Joe Benarroch stepping into a senior business operations role.
“Tomorrow, I start a different professional adventure at Twitter, taking on a role focusing on business operations,” Benarroch shared on LinkedIn on Sunday.
Benarroch, a former Facebook employee, has spent the past four years at NBCUniversal on its advertising and partnerships team, which was previously headed by Yaccarino.
Yaccarino worked for the media conglomerate for nearly 12 years, but left her post “effective immediately” 24 hours after Musk announced he’d hired a new CEO.
Yaccarino started at Twitter on Monday, about three weeks earlier than expected, a person familiar with the matter told The Information.
The former NBCUniversal advertising chief hadn’t previously disclosed her starting date, but when Musk disclosed in mid-May that he hired a new CEO, he said that she would start “in ~6 weeks!”
Yaccarino welcomed Benarroch “to the flock” via a tweet. “From one bird to the next. Let’s get to work,” she wrote in the post.
Benarroch replied that he’s “looking forward to partnering with the entire team and the industry to build Twitter 2.0 together,” and shared a photo of a new backpack personalized with his initials to tout his excitement for moving “back to tech” and “back to the Bay.”
Benarroch brings more than a decade of advertising experience to Twitter, which ditched much of its communications team when Musk bought the social media site for $44 billion in October 2022.
When The Post reached out to Twitter via its press email, it auto-responded with a poop emoji.
Twitter’s finances have been dire since Musk took over, slashed half the company’s workforce and scared advertisers off the platform, who are reportedly worried that the app will become chaotic under Musk and have moved their marketing dollars elsewhere.
Advertisers flocking from Twitter has hurt its US advertising revenue which, for the five weeks between April 1 and early May, was $88 million — down 59% from 2022, according to documents reviewed by The New York Times.
The struggling company has frequently fallen short of its sales projections, sometimes by up to 30%, and the figures aren’t predicted to improve anytime soon, the documents revealed — an issue that Yaccarino has inherited and will be in charge of fixing.
In recent months, Twitter has had to shell out billions in interest expenses on a $13 billion loan, including about $600 million on capital expenditures.
And now, eleven former janitors who used to clean Twitter’s New York City offices are asking for the social media site to hand over more than $100,000 in back pay.
According to a lawsuit filed on Tuesday and reviewed by The Guardian, Twitter allegedly violated the Displaced Building Service Workers Protection Act when Musk abruptly terminated the workers in December 2022.
The court documents claim Twitter failed to retain the janitors after terminating their contract, which goes against New York City’s Protection Act. The legislation requires new building owners and managers to retain employees for a 90-day transition period after termination if their performance is satisfactory.
The suit says the union representing the workers, SEIU 32BJ, told Twitter of its obligation to retain the janitors for 90 days, but never got a response, The Guardian reported.
The lawsuit claims the workers are owed “hundreds of thousands of dollars in back wages.”
Nearly 50 janitors in Twitter’s San Francisco offices were also fired out of the blue in December 2022 once Musk took over as CEO. They were denied severance pay or proper notice, which inspired San Francisco to pass similar legislation to New York’s Displaced Building Service Workers Protection Act.
The new ordinance, passed in April, requires San Francisco employers to retain security, janitorial and maintenance service workers for 90 days.
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