Elon Musk has announced plans for a new Twitter CEO, but has not said who it is. In a tweet on Thursday, Musk says he has “hired a new CEO for X/Twitter” and that “she will start in ~6 weeks”. Musk will instead take on the role of executive chairman and chief technology officer, “overseeing product, software and sysops” of Twitter.
According to Dylan Byers van Puck Newswill be the new CEO NBC Universal advertising manager Linda Yaccarino, citing two unnamed sources.
The Wall Street Journal reported afterwards that she is “in talks” to take over as Twitter CEO and that an NBCU spokesperson said Yaccarino is currently conducting “back-to-back rehearsals” for a pre-presentation to advertisers.
Twitter and NBCUniversal recently announced an expanded partnership for the service to bolster NBCU’s coverage of the 2023 Olympics, with Yaccarino tweeting to Musk that Twitter should bring Periscope back. She also recently interviewed Musk in person at the Possible 2023 marketing event in Miami.
While Musk may soon no longer be CEO, he still owns the company, which he has renamed “X”. It seems unlikely that giving someone else a specific title will make Twitter a less wild ride. Musk became “Chief Twit” last October when he completed his takeover of the company, followed by the immediate layoff of large swaths of executive staff and thousands of other employees.
Another question is how Musk’s divided attention has affected his other companies (Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, The Boring Company – did we miss one?) and how it will affect them in the future. In December, Tesla investors were openly calling for Musk to hand over control of Twitter as the car company’s stock price fell to $101, just a third of its peak price last year, around $314. Now Tesla has lowered vehicle prices and is facing lower margins in what some are calling an EV price war as it faces more competition than ever before.
While Musk has reformed Twitter policies, seemingly to suit his own whims, speculation has only increased about how long his tenure would last – and how big of an effect it will have on his other companies. The Musk era also included changes that disrupted Twitter’s relationships with users, public safety officials, and others.
Musk’s acquisition of Twitter even affected the platform’s advertising business. Several major advertisers halted spending on Twitter over concerns that Musk’s views on free speech could damage their reputation, and the spate of fake verified accounts that appeared on the platform after the initial launch of Musk’s revamped Twitter Blue didn’t help either.
Musk eventually rolled out a more expensive Twitter Blue subscription, banned old “legacy” verified checkmarks for users with less than a million followers, and ushered in a UI makeover that sees users swiping between an algorithmically sorted, recommendation-based For You list. timeline and a chronological Next one. He also rolled out encrypted DMs only to authenticated users.
Musk anticipated the CEO change with a December poll asking followers if he should “step down as head of Twitter,” pledging to abide by the wishes of the public (and likely bots).
The vote came after Musk made a widely criticized policy change that seemingly banned sharing links to other social networking sites. Musk later clarified the rule and then reversed it, promising that major policy changes would be voted on in the future — not the first time he promised that decisions on Twitter would be made by a committee. A few minutes later he tweeted the poll on resignationwhich received about 17.5 million responses, with 57.5 percent indicating that he should no longer be CEO of Twitter.
The poll wasn’t the first indication that Musk would eventually find someone else to take over Twitter’s day-to-day operations. In November, while testifying in court about his compensation as CEO of Tesla, he said, “I expect to shorten my time at Twitter and find someone else to run Twitter over time,” which was in line with previous reports that his role as CEO was being pitched. from the beginning as a temporary one.
Update 7:55 PM ET: Added reports that Linda Yaccarino is Twitter’s new CEO.