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It didn’t take Linda Yaccarino long to get a new job after leaving Elon Musk’s X, where she was CEO.
On Tuesday, just a month after exiting her high-profile job, she was named CEO of EMed, a telehealth startup that sells weight-loss drugs.
It might seem like a right turn for an executive who’s made her name selling advertising for big-name companies. Before X, Yaccarino was the head of ad sales for NBCUniversal.
But if you look closely, it’s not that surprising. Yaccarino told confidants for years before taking the X job that she wanted to be CEO of a company. And despite Yaccarino being X’s CEO, Musk continued to manage major parts of the company, including product design and technology. She hadn’t yet gotten a full shot.
After X, landing atop a media company might have been an uphill climb after a turbulent tenure that included the social-media company suing several prominent advertisers, including Nestlé, Colgate, and Shell.
EMed, on the other hand, gives her a chance to establish her CEO bona fides outside the blast radius of Musk.
“She finally gets to be a true CEO that I don’t think Elon let her be. It’s an opportunity to rehabilitate her reputation,” said Lou Paskalis, a longtime ad industry figure who’s been close to Yaccarino.
For EMed, it’s a chance for a little-known company to leverage Yaccarino’s connections with business leaders and CEOs as it looks to expand.
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“They’re capitalizing on those relationships,” Paskalis said.
EMed cited Yaccarino’s time at X as an asset in announcing her hire, calling her a “hands-on visionary” whose experience will help it expand to develop employer and government partnerships.
“Her ability to forge game-changing partnerships and navigate complex markets will position the company to become the definitive global leader in population health solutions,” the company said in a statement.
Yaccarino, for her part, said in the statement that she saw 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.”
When Musk hired Yaccarino at X, many in the industry had high hopes for her success, given her strong relationships with the ad community. Instead, she had to spend a lot of time doing damage control for Musk, as Business Insider previously reported.
The EMed role might just be Yaccarino’s chance to get what she wanted all along.
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