Three years ago, I designed a trading algorithm that predicted market moves based on the propagation of information & sentiment from niche communities in Twitter and Reddit to niche media sites to mainstream media sites. It was relatively accurate. I pity anyone trying to trade on such data today when the truth-to-fiction ratio is at an all-time low.
At 10:11 AM Monday morning, a verified Twitter account named “BloombergFeed” posted an image of a smoke plume near the Pentagon along with a message saying that a nearby explosion had been reported. In reality, the account was unaffiliated with Bloomberg, the image was AI generated, and the headline about an explosion was 100% fake.
It took about 20 minutes for media & government sources to release statements debunking the story. Arlington Fire & EMS released a statement on Twitter at 10:27 AM.
Unfortunately, the stock market had already reacted to the fake news with the S&P 500 taking a dive. At least, that’s what every large media outlet posted articles claiming.
NY Times: “An A.I.-Generated Picture Stokes a Stock Market Plunge“
AP News: “FACT FOCUS: Fake image of Pentagon explosion briefly sends jitters through stock market”
Barron’s: “An AI-Generated Pentagon Image Caused a Brief Panic in the Stock Market”
Fox Business: “Image believed to be generated by AI showed fake explosion at Pentagon, sending stock market into brief nosedise“
Cointelegraph: “AI-generated image of Pentagon explosion causes stock market stutter“
Yesterday, I started researching the timeline of events, including the viral path of the fake image through social media, in order to write my own article on AI market manipulation. But instead, I discovered that all the mainstream media articles I just quoted were actually false. The AP’s “FACT FOCUS” article contained fake news–oh the irony.
The S&P 500 price chart below has 1-minute granularity. The first black dot shows exactly when BloombergFeed tweeted the fake image, and the second dot shows when Arlington Fire & EMS tweeted to debunk the fake image.
The S&P 500 declined from 9:42 AM to 10:10 AM, and then reversed within 1 minute of when BloombergFeed tweeted the fake image at 10:11 AM. Other “distributor” Twitter accounts such as @UKR_Report independently shared the fake image at almost the same moment. Yet immediately afterwards, the S&P 500 did not drop. It rose.
Social media data suggests 10:10-10:11 AM was the temporal epicenter of virality for the fake image, yet that is the same time when the stock market reversed its 28 minute decline into a roughly 20 minute recovery which only started to dip again AFTER the fake image had already been debunked.
That means there is no positive correlation between the viral spread of the fake image and any price decline in the S&P 500. Furthermore, even if the timing of the fake image virality and stock market drop DID line up, the correlation with price would be so insignificant as to be indistinguishable from noise! That’s because the largest intraday swing in the stock market on Monday was about 0.7%. For comparison, during the first 8 months of 2022, 87.3% of all trading days had intraday swings of at least 1%. In other words, the stock market drop being attributed to the fake image is indistinguishable from everyday random stock market fluctuations.
Elon Musk bought Twitter in order to save the world from the tyranny that would inevitably follow a loss of free speech on the internet. At least, that’s Elon’s narrative. But according to Twitter’s own self-reported data, Twitter fully complied with 83% of government requests and court orders since Elon took control of the company. In contrast, Twitter reported approximately 51% compliance in its last report before Elon’s acquisition. That means Elon’s Twitter is 32% more compliant with government information & censorship requests than pre-Elon Twitter.
And just last week, Twitter censored 409 tweets in Turkey ahead of the country’s presidential election. So is Elon’s free speech advocacy narrative a lie?
Not exactly. Elon has clearly stated from the beginning that his definition of free speech was speech which matches the law. In other words, he was advocating for social media to allow all legally allowable speech, but he wasn’t arguing that social media companies should go spurn the law.
That meant, for example, that Twitter shouldn’t unilaterally decide to ban a U.S. president, but should, for example, still respond to court orders to remove defamatory tweets.
If someone is a free speech absolutist, as Elon Musk has sometimes claimed to be, then it is fair to criticize him for not allowing ALL speech, regardless of whether or not it is legal. But such a criticism would be impractical because Twitter would soon be shut down in every country in the world for violating local laws. It’s also ironic that some of the same people now criticizing Elon for complying with government censorship requests have previously argued that “billionaires are not elected officials, so why should they be making decisions on how our society is run?”
Still, there is an unignorable moral dilemma that arises when deciding whether abiding by the laws of the land is a good policy for media companies operating in a country like Turkey which has been slipping into authoritarianism over the past several years under president Erdogan. Can you really claim to be a free speech absolutist if you help governments censor investigative journalists before an election?
Here is how Twitter’s global affairs department responded to criticism of Twitter’s actions to censor certain tweets and accounts in Turkey:
“We received what we believed to be a final threat to throttle the service–after several such warnings–and so in order to keep Twitter available over the election weekend, [we] took action on four accounts and 409 Tweets identified by court order.”
Three of the accounts referenced were:
The account of Muhammed Yakut, a Kurdish businessman who has criticized Turkish incumbent president Erdogan’s regime.
The account of Cevheri Guven, an investigative journalist.
An anonymous influencer account of a self-described activist and freedom fighter in Turkey.
The fourth is unknown.
Appendix: Elon’s Message to Advertisers After His Acquisition of Twitter
“The reason I acquired Twitter is because it is important to the future of civilization to have a common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner, without resorting to violence. There is currently great danger that social media will splinter into far right wing and far left wing echo chambers that generate more hate and divide our society… That is why I bought Twitter… I didn’t do it to make more money. I did it to try to help humanity, whom I love… That said, Twitter obviously cannot become a free-for-all hellscape, where anything can be said with no consequences! In addition to adhering to the laws of the land, our platform must be warm and welcoming to all, where you can choose your desired experience according to your preferences…”
Harlan Crow is a Dallas-based real estate developer who was thrust into the public spotlight after ProPublicauncovered 20 years of previously undisclosed gifts from Harlan to Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas.
But this article isn’t about that — it’s about how Harlan Crow (and his family) became billionaires in the first place so that they could afford to take private jets to Indonesia and own a private superyacht like this:
Poor Dad, Billionaire Dad
The story starts with Harlan Crow’s father, Fred Trammell Crow, who grew up so poor that he couldn’t go to college after graduating high school, jumped around between different odd jobs and careers until he was 33, and yet eventually controlled more real estate than any other person in America.
Fred Trammell Crow
Fred Trammell Crow (who just went by his middle name Trammell) graduated high school during the great depression and couldn’t afford to go to college. For years, he worked odd (unglamorous) jobs, from plucking chickens to cleaning bricks to unloading boxcars to delivering messages back and forth between divisions of a bank. Eventually, he saved up enough to attend night school for accounting and several years later, he became a CPA. A couple years after that, he joined the Navy as an auditor at the start of World War 2. Five years later, he left the Navy again struggled to find his footing in business. He worked for a moving company for a brief time and then as a wholesale grain merchant, working for his wife’s family’s business.
When one of the other tenant’s in the grain warehouse needed more space, Trammell was 33 years old and he decided to take a risk. He took out a personal loan to build a warehouse while only having a portion of the building pre-leased. He completed the warehouse in 1948, and successfully leased the remaining portion of it to other tenants. That was the start of his would-be billion dollar career in real estate development.
After that, he was prolific. He started finding and partnering with as many people as he could. By the mid 1950’s, Trammell was the largest warehouse developer in Dallas.
Trammell grew his business by seeking out partners who would provide the land or money that he needed to build. This allowed him to continuously scale his real estate empire without needing to pause to accumulate cash flow from one project to reinvest into the next.
“Genuine partnership is the ideal business form… Sharing the efforts and the fruits, the risks and rewards. When embraced with full and proper spirit, it works magic.”
Fred Trammell Crow
And Trammell embrace the partnering strategy HARD. By 1974, he was personally tied to a web of over 600 partnerships and corporations.
But real estate development has a reputation of being financially risky for a reason. Development is speculative. You guess that if you build something, tenants will come. Sometimes you’re right, sometimes you’re wrong, and sometimes you’re right but you don’t get as much rent as you thought you’d get or it takes longer to find those tenants than you anticipated.
By the end of 1974, Trammell’s real estate empire was cash flowing negative $25 million per year. The real estate market had slowed significantly, interest rates were high, and Trammell’s debt load was huge.
Trammell was forced to sell off some properties, but he continued to develop multiple new projects simultaneously to generate more cash.
In 1977, Trammell reorganized the company, diversified into investment banking and property management, and hired a CEO to replace himself. That helped the company survive and recover from the credit crunch of the mid 1970’s.
In 1984, the comapny completed Dallas’s first post-modern skyscraper: the 50-story Trammell Crow Center. The company had $13 billion of assets (and a lot of debt) and 5,000 employees.
But then another round of problems came as the Southwestern real estate market hit turbulence. Trammell lost many of his commercial real estate partners and the company’s shareholder equity fell from $1.7 billion in 1986 to $1.3 billion in 1988.
By 1991, many more company reorganizations, spin-offs, and mergers had occurred. By 1992, the main company controlled 6,500 properties worth $9 billion. The company was the largest real estate services firm and provided property management, facilities management, construction, development, asset management, brokerage, and leasing/marketing services.
In 1994, Harlan (the son of Trammell who we started this article talking about — the guy who was taking Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas on luxury vacations) became the majority shareholder of the company.
In 1997, the Trammell Crow Company IPO’d, and its stock had the ticker symbol TCC.
In 2006, TCC was acquired by CBRE Group, a massive real estate and investment conglomerate that is ranked 122nd on the Fortune 500.
Oh, and parallel to all of this, Trammell also founded Wyndham Hotels in 1981, and that also generated a lot of wealth for the Crow family.
Crow Holdings
The Crow family money is now organized into a new structure: Crow Holdings. Harlan previously served as the CEO and now is just the chairman of the company.
The business has two main segments:
Real estate development (industrial & multifamily only)
Real estate investment fund management (with a focus on institutional investors)
The company’s real estate funds focus on industrial and multifamily investments. However, the company also pursues a strategy of niche portfolio aggregation. It will curate, buy, and aggregate small assets in a particular niche like convenience and gas stores or manufactured housing. Once it has accumulated a large enough portfolio in that niche, it will sell it to institutional investors.
Business Philosophy
“Mr. Crow changed the landscape of the way the real estate business is done. If you look at all of the people who grew from within his organization and all of the companies they went on to create… It’s a culture that you’ll probably never see again.”
One of the things which worked well for the Trammell Crow Company was its culture. Trammell focused on people. It had an internal university which it used to train its employees, and employees were encouraged to grow professionally and even leave the company if they wanted to. TCC partnered with many real estate companies founded by TCC alumni, and the prospect of participating in that loop was an effective way to attract ambitious talent.
“[I] reported directly to [Trammell Crow] in business for about a year fresh out of college. Accelerated Real Estate 101 on steroids like I never learned in college! … He was quick to make decisions involving dollar amounts above my comprehension at that time. He stressed the importance of always being a ‘man of your word’ and to do business on a handshake… He also made it a point to teach me as we went along. He would always make time for me on a personal level; something I did not abuse but was very appreciative of…[Trammell was] clearly an intense thinker. You could walk into a room and ask him a question and [after] standing there silently [in deep concentration] for about 30 seconds or more, he would look up and answer the question as if no time had passed.”
But Trammell went further. He was eccentric. He was almost hippy in some ways, yet staunchly conservative in his advocacy for taking personal responsibility for one’s life.
At one time, he gave a speech saying that his biggest secret to success was taking complete responsibility for everything in his life:
“Though there are myriads of things which have affected us and have been a part of the cause of our success, one thing stands out in my mind above all… I believe that few persons or companies experience success without knowing and living this matter. The matter is this: Everything that happens to me in my life is my own responsibility–solely and absolutely my own responsibility. I can claim or expect no help from anyone! It’s all up to me! … Now life doesn’t guarantee you everything, no matter how you try, but you’ll only get the best that life has for you when you understand and absolutely observe that it’s all up to you. Let me tell you a secret. Fate is kinder to those who so face life… And people support more those who take the complete responsibility for all and everything in their lives.”
Trammell Crow at the Trammell Crow Company Annual Meeting in 1994
At another time, Trammell gave a speech where he gave a different biggest secret to his success:
“You know what it is? It’s love! It’s the most powerful force in the world, and it will do more for us individually and as a company than anything else we can do.”
So it seems like Trammell really has 3 keys to success:
Partnership.
Love.
Taking complete responsibility for everything that happens to you.
A hook is the whatever you say or do in the first few seconds of a YouTube video in order to capture the attention and interest of the viewer and make them want to keep watching. In the table below, I list the hooks from 27 high-performing business and finance videos, along with a description of the “hook types” which are reasons why each hook works.
Hook
Hook Types
Video Performance
Video Title
Channel
1
Economists just can’t seem to give a simple answer to the question: “Do we need to have more or less children?”
Curiosity trigger
Familiar question
Controversy
22k views after 2 hours
Do We Need More or Less Children? | Economics Explained
Economics Explained
2
This is Iran. A country that could be one of the most prosperous and powerful economies in the world in less than a decade if it was given the chance.
Visual
Controversy
334k views after 3 days
This Country’s Economy Could Be Huge, But They Don’t Care | Economics Explained
Economics Explained
3
This is Lebanon. A small country on the Mediterranean coast home to 5.5 million people, according to best available data.
Visual
Controversy
518k views after 10 days
This Country Lost 50% of Its Economy in 2 Years | Economics Explained
Economics Explained
4
This is Israel. A small Middle Eastern country on the Mediterranean Sea that is home to 9.4 million people and a surprisingly robust economy.
Visual
Controversy
412k views after 3 weeks
How To Get Rich When The World Is Against You | Economics Explained
Economics Explained
5
Last month, Jerome Powell announced that the Federal Reserve Bank would be moving away from the term “transitory inflation”.
Flip-flopping
Controversy
Anger
977k views after 1 year
How is “Transitory” Inflation Going? | Economics Explained
Economics Explained
6
Alright, it’s time to add another few countries to the list of where I am not welcome. This is the Line. A 170 kilometer long, 500 meter high city in the desert proposed by the Saudi Arabian government as part of their Neom project.
Visual
Controversy
2.6 Million views after 7 months
Why The Gulf States Need To Keep Building Big Dumb Mega Projects | Economics Explained
Economics Explained
7
At an event in Arizona a few months ago marking the opening of a new Taiwan semiconductor plant, Morris Chang the company’s founder stated that globalization is almost dead and free trade is almost dead, and they are unlikely to come back.
Controversy
242k views after 4 days
The Death of Globalization!
Patrick Boyle
8
Last month it was announced that China and Brazil had signed an agreement to trade on trade in mutual currencies, abandoning the use of the U.S. dollar as an intermediary.
Controversy
380k views after 2 weeks
Would a BRICS Common Currency Work?
Patrick Boyle
9
Carl Icahn has had a long career in markets, starting out as a stock broker in 1961, later becoming a risk arb and options trader. In the 70s and 80s, he was a notorious corporate raider. He was accused of being an asset stripper, the worst kind of stripper, in his dealings with TWA.
Business Celebrity Gossip
Controversy
228k views after 11 days
Carl Icahn Comes Under Fire!
Patrick Boyle
10
Do you ever see those Forbes 30 under 30 lists, and they might make you feel a bit down, as there seems to be at least 30 people on the planet who are under the age of 30 and doing a bit better than you are?
Relatable question
Articulation of viewer emotion
1 Million views after 1 month
Forbes Has a Fraud Problem
Patrick Boyle
11
The period between the end of the American Civil War and the turn of the century, so 1865 through to 1900 in the United States, was a time of rapid economic growth that became known as the Gilded Age.
Resentment
Controversy
1.2 Million views after 6 months
How They Got Rich!
Patrick Boyle
12
1 Hyde Park is a luxury apartment building in Nightsbridge, London. It was developed by the Candy brothers, designed by Richard Rogers, and completed in 2009. The luxury apartments come with panic rooms, bulletproof glass, and boller-hatted security guards that were trained by the British special forces. One of the apartments in the building was recently listed for sale at $242 million.
Resentment
Controversy
627k views after 6 months
The Dirty Money Capital of The World?
Patrick Boyle
13
Louis Vuitton, Christian Dior, Tiffany — Some of the most popular luxury brands in the world, all housed under one roof: Louis Vutton Moet Hennessy, or LVMH.
Relatable observation
Mild surprise or controversy
245k views after 1 day
How LVMH Became A $500 Billion Luxury Powerhouse
CNBC
14
Every religion has its mysterious. One of the closest guarded secrets of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints has been its wealth. Tonight, you will hear, for the first time, about its remarkable size, from a former manager at the Church’s investment firm. David Nielson says that during his 9 years managing money at the church firm, the value of its investments ballooned past $100 billion.
When it comes to fast food, McDonalds is unrivaled in scale and success. McDonalds has held onto its crown for decades, selling more fries, burgers, nuggets, and apple pies every year than any other fast food chain by orders of magnitude.
Visual
Relatable observation
78k views after 2 months
Burger Wars: How Wendy’s Toppled Burger King
Modern MBA
16
Starbucks has been a mainstay in business school literature and management training as a role model for innovation, branding, vertical integration, and corporate social responsibility.
Visual
Controversy
83k views after 3 days
Why Starbucks Must Crush Unions to Survive
Modern MBA
17
There are few things that sell as well as security. In America, burglaries and home invasions are highly publicized crimes that surface regularly in fiction and media.
Visual
Relatable observation
162k views after 3 weeks
The Shoddy Business of Home Security
Modern MBA
18
There are few companies that match the fame and notoriety of Uber. As a ride hailing service, Uber is divisive.
Familiarity
272k views after 3 months
Why Uber Fails to Disrupt Transportation
Modern MBA
19
<clip of a Masterworks ad>
Clipped third-party video
675k views after 3 months
The Problem With Masterworks
The Plain Bagel
20
Passive income: the whole grail of personal finance topics. The ability to earn money without doing anything. And it’s something you’ll see video after video and ad after ad talking about, pushing the idea that millionaires earn 7 different streams of income so, so should you. There’s just one problem: passive income doesn’t exist. Not really anyway.
Relatable observation
Controversy
995k views after 6 months
The Passive Income Scam
The Plain Bagel
21
Ladies and gentleman, welcome to the Plain Bagel, I’m your host Richard Coffin. If you’ve been on finance youtube long enough, you’ve seen your fair share of burning dollar bills and thumbnails that highlight that this is the end. Well you might have noticed a bit more burning greenbacks than usual lately given recent headlines that spell trouble for the U.S. economy.
Relatable observation
272k views after 3 weeks
Let’s Talk De-Dollarization – Why the Dollar Isn’t Going Anywhere Anytime Soon
The Plain Bagel
22
<clip of Linda interviewing Elon Musk>
Clipped third-party video
46k views after 23 hours
Twitter’s New CEO: Why Elon Musk Chose NBCU’s Linda Yaccarino | WSJ
Wall Street Journal
23
Sam: Alright so we have Austin here, Austin Rief, founder of Morning Brew. I know how big you guys are, I don’t know what the public numbers are so I’ll let you kinda say, how big is the company now?
Austin: Yeah $70, $75 million of revenue this year, double digit profit margin, 250 people or so.
Familiarity
Curiosity trigger
Big money number
55k views after 4 months
How To Grow A $75M Newsletter Business | Morning Brew Co-Founder
My First Million
24
Shaan: What are easy businesses that you’ve started.. like for me, Milk Road was a way easier business, than any business I had ever started. What’s been an easy business for you?
Sam: And where does agencies rank on the easy to hard scale?
Strong financial curiosity trigger (I could use the answer to make money!)
107k views after 5 months
Ranking The Best And Worst Businesses To Start w/ Billionaire Investor Andrew Wilkinson
My First Million
25
Alright we have more changes unfolding in the U.S. economy, changes that now have triggered massive levels of anxiety in the bond market.
Fear
Urgency
16k views after 20 hours
Bond Market Risk FLASHING RED as Manufacturing Sector CRASH Breaks Record
RJ Talks
26
Welcome back to another episode of the Modern Mastery Podcast where we help you optimize your human experience through wholistic personal development. Mind, body, spirit, with business as your vessel for freedom.
Familiar intro
“Cult speak”
134k views after 1 year
Justin Welsh Shows You How To Start & Grow A One-Person Business
Dan Koe
27
In the last video, we went over what limits are and how to find them. So, in this video, we are going to go over a real life application of limits to find when your dad is coming home. Your dad went to the grocery store with $3 to buy some.. milk. It’s been 15 years and he hasn’t come back, so firstly, let’s set up a graph.
Humor (absurd, hilarious, deadpan)
10 Million views after 1 year
Using Math to Find When Your Dad is Coming Back with the Milk
*This is an educational math video, not a business or finance video, but it is a content masterpiece.
Sen. Lindsey Graham:“Do you agree, Mr. Altman, that these tools you’re creating should be licensed?”
Sam Altman (CEO of OpenAI):“Yes. We’ve been calling for this.”
Sen. Lindsey Graham:“And do you agree with me that the simplest way and the most effective way [to implement AI licensing requirements] is have an agency that is nimbler and smarter than Congress, which should be easy to create, overlooking what you do?”
Sam Altman:“Yes. We’d be enthusiastic about that.”
AI regulation is a matter of what and when, not if. That creates both risks and opportunities for founders of, executives at, and investors in AI companies. In this article, I summarize the key business-relevant developments from today’s three-hour Senate hearing on AI regulation.
The most repeated concerns from senators were:
Misinformation (especially related to elections and healthcare).
Intellectual property rights (especially related to the use of copyright-protected works that are used to train generative AI models).
Safety (a catch-all term that was used numerous times to refer to everything from child safety to non-proliferation of AI that could design novel biological agents to not encouraging self harm).
The (not-mutually-exclusive) list of possible solutions that had the most momentum in the committee consisted of:
“Nutrition Labels” for AI models. These would be required consumer disclosures about what data a model was trained on and how it scores on various bias benchmark tests.
FDA-like Clinical Trials. AI models would be subject to clinical trial-like testing before they could be put into production. Third-party scientists would participate in auditing the AI models to ensure safety standards were met.
A federal right-of-action. This would be a statute that goes beyond simply clarifying that section 230 doesn’t apply to generative AI companies. It would also preempt states and ensure that anyone who was harmed by a generative AI company could sue that company in a federal court.
Copyrights for AI. Copyrighted works could not be used to train generative AI models without the copyright holder’s permission.
A new AI regulatory agency. This agency would require licensure of any AI models above a certain scale of computational power, number of users, and/or abilities. Multiple senators compared this to how nuclear reactors or pharmaceutical drugs require licensure.
The AI regulatory agency was the most discussed solution and was supported by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman as well as a core bipartisan group of 5 senators:
Senator Michael Bennett (D-CO)
Senator Peter Welch (D-VT)
Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC)
Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ)
Senator John Kennedy (R-LA)
Some other senators including Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA) seemed to be seriously and genuinely considering the agency solution.
However, it’s likely that if a new agency is created to regulate AI, the scope of the new agency wouldn’t actually be restricted to just AI. There are multiple groups of senators with their own pet bills that they have been trying to pass in recent years to regulate tech companies, and any new agency bill would probably incorporate at least some of those.
For example, last year Sen. Bennett and Sen. Welch introduced the Digital Platform Commission Act to try to create a new agency that would regulate tech companies. During today’s hearing, Sen. Welch said that they would be reintroducing the bill this year (with AI rebranding).
Similarly, Senators Klombuchar, Coons, and Cassidy have their own pet: the “Platform Accountability Transparency Act” which require that social media companies disclose their algorithms to certain researchers. Given that many of the senators and witnesses at today’s hearing advocated for various types of data or model transparency for AI, Sen. Klombuchar’s bill could easily be merged with Sen. Bennett’s bill to create a bill that has sweeping consequences for the entire tech industry from social media companies to AI companies.
“We cannot afford to be as late to responsibly regulate generative AI as we have been to social media, because the consequences, both positive and negative, will exceed those of social media by orders or magnitude.”
Senator Christopher Coons (D-CT), May 16, 2023 Senate Hearing on AI
Twitter’s New CEO Was Hired to Quintuple Advertising Revenue
Twitter lost over 50% of its advertising revenue (and possibly as much as 89%) in the 6 months after Elon Musk took control of the company. Companies like Mondelez International, Coca-Cola, Merck, Hilton, and AT&T halted all advertising on Twitter, and other companies like HBO, Amazon, and IBM pulled back close to 90% of their ad spending on the platform.
Musk needed someone with deep relationships to the chief marketing officers and advertising agencies that serve the biggest companies in America. That’s why he hired Linda Yaccarino to be Twitter’s new CEO.
Linda served as NBCUniversal’s chief of advertising sales from 2011 to 2023 and was responsible for transforming the company’s advertising model.
In 2011, NBCUniversal had 15 different sales teams that each went after the same clients, and clients had to deal with multiple sales teams to buy the ad inventory they wanted to. Linda consolidated those 15 teams into a single sales team and gave ad buyers a single point of contact for their purchases.
In 2015, Linda stopped providing Nielsen TV ratings for CNBC, claiming that those ratings were missing up to 30% of the channel’s audience across new digital channels. Instead, CNBC would sell ads based on new metrics provided by marketing and research firm Cogent Reports.
In 2019, Linda helped design a deal that gave NBCUniversal exclusive rights to all media and sponsorship opportunities for the 2028 LA-based Olympic games so that marketers could come to NBC as a one-stop-shop for all media and sponsorship opportunities related to the Olympics.
Her playbook has been to consolidate media properties and client experiences, and to sell ads based on metrics that measure the full value of those consolidated properties. That is an attractive playbook for Elon who has grand ambitions of turning Twitter into an “everything app” (like WeChat) that combines messaging, social media, and payments.
But more importantly for the short term survival of Twitter, Linda has deep professional and personal connections in the advertising world. A month before her new Twitter role was announced, Linda interviewed Elon at a the POSSIBLE marketing conference. During the interview, Linda played diplomat (and did so quite well) between Elon and the advertising community. That’s exactly what Twitter needs right now in order to rebuild its advertising revenue.
Linda seems to have built her career through diplomacy. She was a member of President Trump’s Council on Sports, Fitness, and Nutrition, and she worked with the Biden administration on a Covid vaccine campaign. She is a member of the World Economic Forum (WEF)’s Media, Entertainment, and Culture committee which is viewed by some people on the right as an unelected group of elites trying to push a “woke” agenda. Yet she is also working with Elon Musk who has himself criticized the WEF and who is disliked for many reasons by some people on the left.
Linda seems to have thread the diplomatic needle relatively well in her career so far. She brings a notably different view to the table than Elon Musk, and in my opinion, the two of them (Musk working on product and Linda working on advertising operations) will be an effective team.
Nevertheless, some of Elon Musk’s own fans aren’t happy with his decision to hire her.
Billboard Chris either doesn’t realize or doesn’t care that Twitter is not a charity — Twitter needs advertising revenue to survive. And every major advertising pocket is deeply concerned with brand safety (i.e. not having their brands become associated with hateful opinions that make people feel sad).
In general, critics have three main worries about Linda (all political rather than business):
She is a member of the WEF and therefore is infected with the “woke mind virus”. Yet they same critics are silent on the fact that Trump also appointed her to one of his committee’s while he was President.
She advocated for wearing masks during the Covid pandemic.
She helped Biden run a Covid vaccine campaign. Yet the same critics support Trump and are silent on the fact that the vaccine was Trump’s idea to begin with.
None of these criticisms are likely to result in a Twitter boycott or brand damage though since Musk fans still trust him.
Quotes by Linda Yaccarino
“There are several news organizations who don’t like your push for democratization and what they believe is the devaluing of the badges, because they were differentiated.”
Linda Yaccarino (Speaking to Elon Musk at a marketing conference)
“Most news organizations have a codependent relationship with Twitter, and I can speak on behalf of the industry, but I’ll speak on behalf of my own company [NBCUniversal], we have a big distribution partnership with [Twitter]. There are days where I see some of your tweets and I say, I wish I could say, stop helping the situation…”
Linda Yaccarino (Speaking to Elon Musk)
“When you’re in the media business, or even in the marketing business, you have to know who your consumer is, and you actually have to be focused on where they’re going next.”
