Quiet leadership

Hello from London. The death of Susan Wojcicki, YouTube’s longtime chief, came as a shock in part because the executive chose to live as pri [View in browser]( [Bloomberg]( [by Mark Bergen]( Hello from London. The death of Susan Wojcicki, YouTube’s longtime chief, came as a shock in part because the executive chose to live as privately as she could. But first... Three things you need to know today: • Donald Trump returned to X with several posts [promoting his campaign]( • He then had a lengthy, glitchy and friendly [interview with Musk]( • Ashlee Vance went inside [Worldcoin’s audacious Orb factory]( ‘A voice of reason’ In 2019, Google’s YouTube was reeling from disasters that angered its advertisers and video-makers. So Susan Wojcicki, its leader, attempted to reduce the tension by appearing in the spotlight. On YouTube channels with popular creators, she talked about her favorite yoga and cooking influencers, and gamely answered tense questions about her decisions and the [uglier sides]( of her platform. But the executive never seemed entirely comfortable as a star on her own stage. In stark contrast to Mark Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey — and certainly Elon Musk — YouTube's longtime chief was a social media tycoon who preferred to operate in the background. “She is not charismatic. But to her credit, that’s not a bad thing at all," Kim Scott, an early director at Alphabet Inc.’s Google, told me for [my book on YouTube’s history](. Charismatic leaders have the potential to doom their businesses, “because it’s all about them,” Scott added. Few outside her inner circle knew Wojcicki was battling cancer for two years. She [died recently from lung cancer]( at age 56 — a tragic loss that sent shockwaves across Silicon Valley. She was instrumental to Google’s growth, managing several key products and shaping much of its $240 billion advertising business. She ran YouTube from 2014 until 2023, cementing its status as a global media empire. In many ways, she was an archetypal Google executive: a business leader with remarkable power over the digital lives of billions, and a remarkably low public profile. Inside the company, Wojcicki built a reputation for empowering deputies and being unflappable. “She thrived in the lightly-controlled chaos at Google, always being the voice of reason,” Alan Eustace, a longtime executive, [wrote in a remembrance](. Scott described Wojcicki as “a Larry whisperer” capable of getting Google’s co-founder and first CEO, Larry Page, “to see reason” when others couldn’t. “The founders trust Susan maybe more than anybody on the planet,” Patrick Keane, an early Google leader, told me. Wojcicki arrived at YouTube looking to supercharge its ads business and promote its homegrown stars, viewed at the time as several rungs below Hollywood A-listers. She preferred to make decisions through consensus, although the platform often struggled to explain its positions to creators and regulators. Like other social sites in Silicon Valley, YouTube wasn’t prepared for the Donald Trump-era mess of [extremism]( misinformation and cries of censorship. Her plans to seriously rival [Spotify]( and [Netflix]( fell short. Yet YouTube’s success as a video ads business and cultural staple is undisputed. Its problems with misbehaving and irate creators, while far from over, quieted by the end of Wojcicki’s tenure. And YouTube has dodged the intense political scrutiny that its social media rivals face, a feat many Wojcicki fans attribute to her leadership and unassuming style.  Hank Green, a veteran YouTuber who had many polite disagreements with Wojcicki over the years, offered one of the more [profound tributes]( “People feel like the structure of the world is inevitable, but it is built by people and what yall built under Susan’s quiet leadership in a ridiculously complex environment is extremely special and head and shoulders above what others created. I’m so sad to have lost her.”—[Mark Bergen](mailto:mbergen10@bloomberg.net) The big story Google is staging a big Pixel product launch this morning. It’ll be the first such event since the company unified development of hardware and the Android operating system under the leadership of Rick Osterloh, who’ll helm proceedings as the company tries to [upstage Apple’s AI iPhone.]( One to watch Expedia posted better-than-expected second-quarter results, though the company warned of a softening in travel demand, leading it to adjust its expectations for the rest of the year. Expedia CEO Ariane Gorin joins Ed Ludlow and Caroline Hyde to discuss why the company is still optimistic for long-term travel trends on Bloomberg Technology. Get fully charged Singapore’s Shopee raised its merchant fees to above the levels of TikTok and Temu as it sought to [buttress its bottom line.]( The Paris Olympics averaged more than 30 million viewers, marking a [large increase from the Tokyo audience](. 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