The "Velvet Hammer" is already getting it done at Twitter. Linda Yaccarino, the "hard-charging executive" enticed by Elon Musk from overseeing ads at NBCUniversal to become Twitter's new CEO, is paying the social media company's bills again—specifically, to Google, reports the Wall Street Journal. Platformer had reported earlier this month that Twitter had ceased paying the Alphabet company for its cloud services, "leading to a high-stakes conflict" between the entities, but Yaccarino has now apparently swooped in to mend ties and get the cash flowing again, for a tab that was amounting to about $20 million-plus a month, sources tell the Journal.
Bloomberg also confirmed that payments have resumed to Google Cloud, which Twitter reportedly uses for data analysis and artificial intelligence. One of the Journal's sources says that Yaccarino hopped on a call last week with Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian to smooth things over, and that the two even talked about expanding their work together around Google's possible use of Twitter's API (application programming interface), as well as its ad spending.
The latter especially would help mitigate Twitter's advertiser woes: According to third-party stats, Google slashed its US ad spending more than 90% year-over-year in May. It wasn't an easy road to get things back on track with Twitter's IOUs. Sources tell Bloomberg that Google Cloud staffers initially tried to reach Musk over the unpaid bills piling up, to no avail—so they then contacted employees at SpaceX, which Musk also owns.
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And there are other Twitter "financial nightmares" that are currently ongoing, per Fortune. That outlet notes the social media company is in the process of getting booted from its office in Boulder, Colorado, for not paying rent for months, and similar troubles have long been brewing with landlords in San Francisco and London. Musk also is said to have reneged on paying bills to database company Oracle and the National Music Publishers' Association, as well as stiffed both rank-and-file workers and top executives he fired, including ex-CEO Parag Agrawal. (More Twitter stories.)
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