Elon Musk's Twitter rate limits could damage the company's 'last best hope,' CEO Linda Yaccarino, ad experts say

• On Saturday, Elon Musk introduced a controversial limit on how many tweets users can view daily.
• Ad experts told Reuters that could this undermine Linda Yaccarino's attempts to salvage the company.
• "He's not capable of empowering her to save him from himself," Lou Paskalis said.

Elon Musk's controversial Twitter rate limits could damage CEO Linda Yaccarino's work to improve the company, ad experts told Reuters.

Lou Paskalis, Bank of America's former marketing boss and the founder of advertising consultancy AJL Advisory, told the news agency Yaccarino is Musk's "last best hope" to resurrect the company's value. 

"This move signals to the marketplace that he's not capable of empowering her to save him from himself," he added.

And Mike Proulx, research director at Forrester, told Reuters the limits are "remarkably bad" for users and advertisers already agitated by Musk's "chaos."

The Twitter CEO took over the role from Musk last month, a couple weeks before she was initially scheduled to start leading the company. 

Yaccarino used to be the advertising sales chief at NBCUniversal, and her expertise in that sector could be vital to encourage advertisers to return to Twitter and make the platform more profitable.

While Musk told the BBC in April that "almost all advertisers have come back," an internal presentation obtained by The New York Times showed that US ad sales that same month were down 59% compared to a year prior. 

To remedy that, Yaccarino told staff to deploy "hand-to-hand combat" to persuade advertisers to return by meeting them in person rather than from behind a desk, the Financial Times reported.

And she's hosted two office events dubbed "Tea Time" to try to boost staffers' low morale, Insider's Kali Hays reported.

But all her effort could be in vain as Musk continues to make unpopular changes to the platform.

Most recently, he announced Saturday that unverified users could only view 600 tweets a day, or 6,000 if they pay $8 a month for Twitter Blue, blaming "extreme levels" of data scraping by AI companies.

That prompted an exodus of users to similar platforms like Bluesky, backed by Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey, which had to pause new sign-ups due to a surge in demand.

Insider contacted Twitter for comment. The company responded with an automated message that didn't address the inquiry.