Twitter is getting a new CEO: Elon Musk says his replacement starts in six weeks
Elon Musk announced that a new woman will become the CEO of Twitter in the next six weeks. Musk has been leading the social media platform since he bought it last year, although he has time and again insisted that his position is not permanent.
According to Musk’s announcement, Twitter’s new CEO will be a woman, but he did not specify who would fill the role.
However, NBCUniversal Head of Advertising Linda Yaccarino is “in talks” for the position, according to the report by The Wall Street Journal.
Musk in a tweet said that his role will transition to being Twitter’s executive chairman and chief technology officer.
Excited to announce that I’ve hired a new CEO for X/Twitter. She will be starting in ~6 weeks!
My role will transition to being exec chair & CTO, overseeing product, software & sysops.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 11, 2023
Earlier, while testifying, Musk said “I expect to reduce my time at Twitter and find somebody else to run Twitter over time.” More than a month later, he tweeted in December: “I will resign as CEO as soon as I find someone foolish enough to take the job.” The pledge came after millions of Twitter users asked him to step down in a Twitter poll the billionaire himself created and promised to abide by.
Earlier in February, he had told a press conference he anticipated finding a CEO for San Francisco-based Twitter ‘probably toward the end of this year.’ Analysts who follow Twitter’s business welcomed the news even without knowing who the replacement will be. Twitter’s advertising business has taken a hit under Musk’s mercurial rule, though the billionaire told BBC last month that the company is now “roughly” breaking even.
“A new CEO is the only way forward for Twitter,” said Insider Intelligence analyst Jasmine Enberg. “The single biggest problem with Twitter’s ad business was Elon Musk. As he steps back, Twitter can begin to unravel Musk’s personal brand from the company’s corporate image and attempt to regain trust among advertisers. The success of those efforts will depend on who takes over, but it’s difficult to imagine that the new CEO could be more controversial or damaging to Twitter’s ad business than Musk has been.”
Musk said he never intended to be CEO of Tesla, and that he didn’t want to be chief executive of any other companies either, preferring to see himself as an engineer. Musk also said at the time that he expected an organizational restructuring of Twitter to be completed in the next week or so. It’s been nearly six months since he said that.
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