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New York
—
Linda Yaccarino, the former CEO of the Elon Musk-owned social media platform X, has a new leadership gig in the weight loss space.
Yaccarino on Tuesday was named the CEO of eMed, a Miami-based telehealth company that dispenses GLP-1 medications such as Wegovy and Ozempic.
The appointment marks a shift for Yaccarino, who has a background largely in marketing, advertising and media world. Prior to joining X, Yaccarino worked in various advertising and global partnerships for NBCUniversal and Turner for several decades.
In a press release, eMed said that Yaccarino is arriving in a “game-changing moment” in the company’s five-year old history, which is to “make safe, effective and sustainable chronic care accessible directly through an all-in-one, digital-first experience.” The company added that her experience would be “instrumental” as it looks to accommodate more “national and global employer and government partnerships.”
“The healthcare industry has been disrupted by technology, but not yet completely transformed by it,” Yaccarino said in a press release. “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.”
EMed got its start during the height of the pandemic in 2020, offering Covid tests and services. However, it has since pivoted to weight loss drugs, joining Weight Watchers, which recently exited bankruptcy and is forging a similar path of selling GLP-1 drugs online.
Yaccarino didn’t immediately respond to CNN’s request for comment.
She joined X, then called Twitter, in June 2023, which was about eight months after Musk bought the social media platform. Her main task was to help fix the platform’s flagging advertising business, after the billionaire alienated brands with his controversial comments and changes to the platform.
But her tenure had been marked by repeated public relations crises, including scrutiny over antisemitic and other hateful content spreading on the platform, viral false claims around international conflicts and ads that appeared alongside pro-Nazi content on the site. That led some brands to pull their spending, for which the Yaccarino-led X sued an advertising industry group — a lawsuit Yaccarino announced in a video message to all X users, in which she decried what she referred to as a conspiracy to boycott the X platform. (The industry group, Global Alliance for Responsible Media, shut down days after the lawsuit was filed.)
A day before she announced her departure, the company’s Grok chatbot began pushing antisemitic tropes in responses to users, however it wasn’t clear that her exit was connected to that incident. The company later apologized.
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