Tweetering on the Glass Cliff
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3.9 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 26 May 2023
⏱️ 21 minutes
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Summary
How Twitter’s new CEO Linda Yaccarino finds herself on the edge of “the glass cliff”: when a woman is sent in to fix a big mess.
Guest: Vittoria Elliot, reporter for Wired, covering platforms and power
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | All right now it's quiet. |
| 0:19.2 | All right. |
| 0:25.0 | Good afternoon, good evening or good morning, everyone, depending on wherever in the world you're joining us from. |
| 0:29.2 | I'm broadcasting live from Twitter headquarters. It's David Sachs here. |
| 0:38.9 | Even before the halting, glitchy, and frankly, weird launch of Ron DeSantis' presidential campaign on Twitter. |
| 0:43.4 | It was clear that Linda Yaccarino was taking a tough job. |
| 0:47.3 | Twitter CEO is not a normal CEO gig, |
| 0:50.6 | especially when you're Elon Musk's pick to run the company. |
| 0:56.3 | The consensus was that whoever took that role was going to have quite an uphill climb. That's Victoria Elliott, who covers platforms and power for Wired. Both because of the |
| 1:02.4 | position that Twitter is in right now, and also because of the visibility that Elon has and |
| 1:07.6 | the fact that even for companies where he's not necessarily running day-to-day operations |
| 1:12.9 | like SpaceX, he's still kind of considered the face of that brand. |
| 1:18.2 | Yakorino has to thread a delicate needle, keeping Musk happy while winning back skeptical advertisers. |
| 1:25.0 | She has a deep background in ads and partnerships. |
| 1:28.2 | That's what she was in charge of at NBC Universal. |
| 1:31.1 | They need someone with that expertise, especially because they have lost so much advertising |
| 1:37.0 | revenue in the six months-ish that Musk has been in charge. |
| 1:41.3 | So I think qualification-wise, she's a very smart and natural pick, |
| 1:45.4 | of course. But there's something else, something Victoria wrote a story about, something that |
| 1:52.0 | fits a pattern in corporate America. It is, I think, not lost on people, specifically like |
| 1:58.3 | academics and experts who study these patterns, that in this |
| 2:02.1 | moment where the company is doing much worse than it's done historically, that it is a woman |
... |
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