According to PitchBook, as of 2022, the venture had raised USD 22 million in total. Before joining X, Linda Yaccarino led NBCUniversal’s worldwide advertising division. The company stated that she will assist eMed in forging “game-changing partnerships” and navigating challenging markets.

“The healthcare industry has been disrupted by technology, but not yet completely transformed by it. There is an opportunity to combine technology, lifestyle, and data in a new, powerful way through the digital channels that impact consumers directly in ways that have never been done before,” Yaccarino said in a statement.

The increasing number of digital health businesses attempting to take advantage of the enormous demand for GLP-1s includes eMed. According to Goldman Sachs analysts, by 2030, 15 million adults in the United States will be taking anti-obesity medications, and the industry may generate USD 100 billion in revenue annually.

In July, Linda Yaccarino resigned from her position as CEO of X. She is a “very sought-after leader” with an “unquestionable ability to negotiate new partnerships,” according to eMed.

“To be a leader in today’s healthcare marketplace, companies need to have a fearless tenacity that allows them not only to grow but also to be brave enough to step forward and redefine an entire industry,” Yaccarino added.

Meet Linda Yaccarino

Linda Yaccarino hails from a close-knit Italian-American family and was born and raised in New York. She showed a keen interest in media and communications at a young age, which inspired her to seek a degree in telecommunications. The academic groundwork for a career encompassing media, advertising, technology, and digital health was laid by her 1985 graduation from Pennsylvania State University’s Donald Bellisario College of Communications.

She started her career at Turner Entertainment, where she worked for almost 15 years before becoming the COO of Ad Sales and Executive Vice President. Linda Yaccarino was credited at Turner with updating the network’s advertising strategy and fostering the growth of more data-driven marketing techniques. She turned traditional ad sales into dynamic, multi-platform campaigns, negotiated high-profile deals, and helped introduce new programming formats, such as the relaunch of Conan O’Brien’s show.

Linda Yaccarino joined NBCUniversal in 2011 as Chair of Global Advertising and Partnerships, where she managed a staff of more than 2,000 people and helped spearhead projects such as the introduction of NBCU’s streaming service, Peacock.

She also assumed public positions, such as chairing the Ad Council, participating in the World Economic Forum’s Future of Work task force, and serving on President Trump’s Council on Sports, Fitness, and Nutrition. Her leadership helped create a vaccine awareness campaign with Pope Francis during the COVID-19 pandemic, bridging the gap between public policy and corporate innovation.

Linda Yaccarino was appointed CEO of X Corp (formerly Twitter) by Elon Musk in May 2023, where she was in charge of the business operations of one of the most closely watched platforms globally. She was tasked with restoring advertiser trust and developing scalable revenue plans while Musk maintained engineering and product control.

During her tenure at X, she worked to stabilise the platform’s revenue and reputation, despite considerable obstacles and public scrutiny. Just over a year after taking on the position, she resigned in July 2025.

Image credits: eMed

The post Business Leader of the Week: Linda Yaccarino’s eMed journey to shape digital healthcare appeared first on International Finance.

Twitter’s new CEO Linda Yaccarino stated, “Powered by AI, X will connect us all in ways we’re just beginning to imagine. We’ve already started to see X take shape over the past eight months through our rapid feature launches, but we’re just getting started.”

However, today International Finance will talk about a topic that, in the coming days, may become the central theme of Twitter’s rebranding efforts.

Is ‘Revenue Generation’ The New Theme?

A recent Wall Street Journal report stated about the micro-blogging platform now offering advertisers in the United States and the United Kingdom a 50% discount on video ads running beside trending topics under the platform’s “Explore” tab, “among other discounts.”

From August 7, brands need to spend at least USD 1,000 on advertisements within the prior 30 days or USD 6,000 in the previous 180 days to retain the gold checkmark, a checkmark that identifies that the account belongs to a verified brand.

Also, Twitter has introduced a new ads revenue sharing program for creators to help people earn a living directly on the micro-blogging platform. Content creators will now be able to earn a share in ad revenue starting from replies to their posts.

This revenue-sharing programme will also be applied to ‘Verified Organizations’ or ‘Twitter Blue Subscribers’ with at least five million post impressions in each of the past three months.

Sad state of financial affairs

In July 2023, Elon Musk informed about cash flow remaining negative in the popular micro-blogging platform, as it was witnessing a nearly 50% drop in advertising revenue and a heavy debt load. These developments have derailed the tech billionaire’s hopes of making Twitter a cash-flow-positive entity by June.

Elon Musk also said in another tweet that Twitter did not see the expected increase in advertising revenue in June. Twitter Spaces too is witnessing a poor run of revenue generation.

Twitter has reduced its non-debt expenditures to USD 1.5 billion from a projected USD 4.5 billion in 2023. Twitter also faces annual interest payments of about USD 1.5 billion due to the debt it took on in the USD 44 billion deal that turned the company private in October 2022, as per a Guardian report.

Elon Musk, however, remarked that Twitter was on track to post USD 3 billion in revenue in 2023, down from the 2021 figure of USD 5.1 billion.

Recently, a CNN report stated that over half of Twitter’s top 1,000 advertisers were no longer spending on the platform in the first weeks of January 2023.

Monthly revenue from these advertisers plummeted by over 60% from October 2022 through January 25, 2023, from around USD 127 million to just over USD 48 million. Before Elon Musk’s takeover, the same entities used to pump USD 4.5 billion worth of yearly revenue into the micro-blogging platform.

Twitter reportedly offered a Super Bowl “fire sale” deal for advertisers. It also partnered with a third-party “brand safety” firm, which would show advertisers if their ads appear alongside inappropriate/unsafe content on Twitter.

However, none of these worked. After Linda Yaccarino took over the leadership reigns of Twitter in June 2023, she too signalled that ad sales were a priority for her venture amid efforts to increase subscription revenue. Twitter is now reportedly focusing on video, creator and commerce partnerships and is in talks with public figures, payments services, and media outlets.

After taking over Twitter’s helm in October 2022, Elon Musk sold verified checks as a part of ‘Twitter Blue Subscriptions,’ However, the move backfired as “verified” accounts parodying brands occupied the micro-blogging space, thus making the platform a ‘High-Risk Zone’ for businesses.

Elon Musk has also introduced limits on how many posts people can read, with verified users receiving preferential treatment to see more tweets. As per the Wall Street Journal, this limitation has resulted in fewer people seeing ads, thus causing advertising prices to rise, as the brands are bleeding due to a reduced audience reach.

The Threads challenge

Amid the financial mess around Twitter, the Mark Zuckerberg-led Meta introduced its ‘Threads’ in July 2023. The app has features similar to Twitter. Threads reached 100 million downloads in the first five days of its launch, breaking records for the explosion of sign-ups on any app ever.

Threads is now taking advantage of its connection with Instagram and Meta to attract advertisers. It is offering various ad formats, like sponsored threads, promoted replies, and branded stickers. The app is also experimenting with new ways of monetizing content, such as tipping, subscriptions, and e-commerce.

If the app manages to retain users, Threads could achieve USD 5 billion in annual ad revenue by 2023 end, equalling Twitter’s 2021 earnings, wealth management firm Bernstein stated. Morningstar analysts predict that Threads could add between USD 2 billion and USD 3 billion to Meta’s revenue every year between 2024 and 2027. Evercore ISI analysts believe that Threads could generate annual revenue worth USD 8 billion by 2025.

Mark Zuckerberg, however, has said his company would only think about monetizing Threads once “there was a clear path to 1 billion users”.

Twitter had nearly 240 million monetizable daily active users as of July 2022. So Threads has a long road ahead.

Meta has been investing to upgrade its AI capacity to boost traffic to Facebook and Instagram and increase ad sales. Even though Threads lacks features like direct messaging, hashtags or keyword searches, expect these to be added to the app in the coming days, which in turn, will increase its appeal to advertisers further.

Taylor Michelle Gerard, a senior executive at content marketing firm Blue Hour Studios, told Reuters some of her clients are considering adding a Threads post along with TikTok or Instagram posts as part of sponsored deals with influencers.

Final Observation

Elon Musk has dubbed X as an ‘everything app’ that will enable messaging, payments and banking. However, his way of running Twitter’s affairs has been an amateurish one. The changes which he has introduced in the venture since October 2022 have been short-sighted and chaotic.

What Elon Musk and Linda Yaccarino need to understand is that more than the rebranding gimmick, Twitter’s time and efforts need to be invested to consolidate its market position against potential rivals like Threads and Bluesky. A good brand thrives on the back of administrative stability, which Twitter lags right now.

The post IF Insights: Will rebranding help Twitter improve its ailing financial health? appeared first on International Finance.

The micro-blogging platform was founded in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone and Evan Williams. In 2012, more than 100 million users were tweeting 340 million tweets daily, and the service processed an average of 1.6 billion searches per day. The company went public in November 2013 and by the year 2019, Twitter had more than 330 million monthly active users.

In 2022, Twitter agreed to a USD 44 billion buyout by Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, in one of the biggest deals ever to take a company private. From July to September that year, Twitter hit the headlines for all the wrong reasons, as Elon Musk initially cancelled the deal, then got dragged to the court by the then leadership of the micro-blogging platform.

In October 2022, Elon Musk finally gave his nod for the USD 44 billion deal. As soon as he took over the company, he fired the micro-blogging platform’s CEO Parag Agarwal, head of legal policy, trust and safety Vijaya Gadde and Chief Financial Officer Ned Segal.

After the leadership change, Twitter has been regularly criticized for an increase in hate speech. His takeover of the company was marked by sweeping policy changes, mass layoffs, resignations, mounting losses, frequent technical glitches, declining brand value and a dramatic shift in the company’s work culture. Twitter also got merged into X Holdings and Twitter was no longer an independent company but part of X Corp.

As the micro-blogging platform saw its ‘Twitter Blue’ initiative backfiring horribly, Elon Musk was frank enough to admit that the pain level of Twitter has been “extremely high”, and that owning the micro-blogging platform hasn’t been “some sort of party” for him. Also, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO getting too involved in the social media platform’s daily administration worried the stakeholders of his other ventures.

Elon Musk has now appointed Linda Yaccarino as the new Twitter CEO, while planning to maintain his firm grip over the social media platform’s leadership ranks. He said that Linda Yaccarino, an American media executive, would start in the next six weeks.

Who Is Linda Yaccarino?
• Linda Yaccarino, of Italian descent, was born and brought up in Deer Park, New York, USA
• She completed her graduation from Pennsylvania State University’s Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications with a bachelor’s degree in telecommunications in 1985
• Following her graduation, Linda Yaccarino worked with Turner Entertainment for 15 years, becoming executive vice-president and chief operating officer of ad sales where she played a key role in developing innovative advertising and marketing solutions
• In 2011, she joined NBCUniversal as the head of the company’s advertising sales. She played a key role in the launch of Peacock streaming service
• In 2014, Linda Yaccarino took up an offer from the Ad Council, an American non-profit organization that produces, distributes, and promotes public service announcements
• In 2018, former US President Donald Trump appointed her to the President’s Council on Sports, Fitness, and Nutrition
• In 2021, Linda Yaccarino became Chairman of the Ad Council’s board of directors till June 2022, where she partnered with the Biden administration to create a coronavirus vaccine campaign
• The same year, she also chaired the future of work task force for the World Economic Forum
• On 12 May 2023, Linda Yaccarino resigned from NBCUniversal and on the same day Elon Musk announced that she would be the new Chief Executive Officer of X Corp. and Twitter
• According to Forbes, Linda Yaccarino’s annual net worth is around USD 40 Million Dollars as of January 2023

Linda Yaccarino Would Focus On Business Operations

Joe Marchese, the former head of ad sales at the Fox Networks Group, who has known Linda Yaccarino for at least a decade said that by electing her, Elon Musk is signalling what has priority for him on Twitter: The advertising business and not the social media know-how.

Linda Yaccarino has been one of Madison Avenue’s power brokers for decades. And Twitter, which derives the bulk of its revenue from advertising, has struggled to grow that business, particularly after Elon Musk spooked advertisers in 2022 with the micro-blogging platform’s takeover. A lion’s share of the industrial biggies left the platform immediately, expressing concern about the rise in hate speech content on Twitter. Even though the billionaire claimed in his recent BBC interview that the advertisers were returning to Twitter, the tale of the micro-blogging platform’s financial struggles is not over yet.

In an interview with New York Times, Joe Marchese said, “Linda’s a force. She has one of the biggest jobs in advertising, and the ad market is as hard as it has ever been.”

He also said, above all, Linda Yaccarino has to contend with Elon Musk as he is a moody and unpredictable boss. The 51-year-old billionaire has a track record of firing executives who don’t meet his goals. Sometimes, without warning, he tweets news about his various businesses, which include electric car maker Tesla.

Meanwhile, Lou Paskalis, a longtime ad executive and friend of Yaccarino, likened her move to Twitter to take a “step into the lion’s mouth.”

“With her stature in the industry as probably one of the most beloved and trusted people on the revenue side, I question why she would subject herself to that kind of potential reputational risk,” he said.

The post Business Leader of the Week: Meet Linda Yaccarino, Twitter’s new CEO appeared first on International Finance.