She had previously expressed admiration for Twitter, calling the platform “the single, No. 1 biggest” content distribution partner for NBCUniversal at an ad industry event soon after Mr. Musk took over the company. At the time, she added that she did not plan to “bet against him” and that she believed he could “learn advertising.”
“I think we can teach him,” she said.
This week, Ms. Yaccarino was in attendance when Mr. Musk spoke at an advertising conference in California’s Napa Valley hosted by WPP, three people familiar with the event said.
Ms. Yaccarino would be a rare female chief executive in technology, as top executives like Meta’s Sheryl Sandberg and YouTube’s Susan Wojcicki have recently left their roles. Throughout her career, Ms. Yaccarino has often said that she has been the only woman at the table and has described incidents of bias, such as the time a male supervisor complained in an otherwise flattering performance review about her aggressiveness: “I only wish she would stop using her high heels as a weapon.”
While Ms. Yaccarino is active on Twitter, her habits are sedate compared to Mr. Musk’s, though in recent weeks, she has liked dozens of posts by and about him.
Still, the differences between Mr. Musk and Ms. Yaccarino were clear last month at the media conference in Miami. A polished Ms. Yaccarino came with prepared comments. An unshaven Mr. Musk spent a few moments wrangling his toddler son, X Æ A-12, before joining her and offering sometimes halting answers to her questions.
Ms. Yaccarino returned repeatedly to worries that her industry colleagues have voiced since Mr. Musk took control of Twitter, emphasizing several times that the audience of ad executives was crucial to the company’s financial success.
Mr. Musk said that “there’s legitimate concerns that advertisers have that I want to hear.” He recounted a complaint he had heard from David Zaslav, the chief executive of Warner Bros. Discovery, who was frustrated that he was unable to place ads for “White Lotus,” the hit HBO show, next to discussions of “White Lotus” on Twitter.
