Elon Musk Finds New CEO For Twitter

Tom Jowitt,
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Twitter and other social media apps on a screen

Elon Musk to remain in charge of parent company X Corp, as identity of new Twitter CEO has not been confirmed

Elon Musk has found his ‘foolish enough’ replacement as Twitter chief executive, and she will apparently start in about six weeks time.

Musk in his tweet about the matter added that his role will transition to “being executive chair and CTO, overseeing product, software & sysops.”

However some may regard the move as a moot point, considering that Musk will remain in charge of Twitter’s holding company – X Corp. Musk has long stated his ambition to turn Twitter into “X, the everything app”.

Image credit: Elon Musk
Image credit: Elon Musk

New CEO

Indeed, Musk wants to turn Twitter into a replica of the Chinese WeChat app, that incorporates different services such as messaging, social media, food orders, and payments etc into a single app.

But it seems that he has now found his replacement to take over the day-to-day running of Twitter – which will please worried investors at Tesla and SpaceX.

Last year Elon Musk had stated he would step down as CEO of Twitter, after he lost a poll in December 2022 asking if he should remain as the Twitter boss.

A majority (57.5 percent) of respondents voted Musk should step down (vs 42.5 percent who voted he should remain as CEO).

Musk then tweeted: “I will resign as CEO as soon as I find someone foolish enough to take the job! After that, I will just run the software & servers teams.”

And it now seems he has founded someone “foolish enough” to take over the CEO role.

“Excited to announce that I’ve hired a new CEO for X/Twitter. She will be starting in ~6 weeks!,” Musk tweeted Thursday. “My role will transition to being exec chair & CTO, overseeing product, software & sysops.”

The identity of the new female CEO has not been confirmed, but the Wall Street Journal reported that NBCUniversal’s global head of advertising, Linda Yaccarino, is in talks to take on the CEO role.

Yaccarino has worked at NBCUniversal for almost 12 years.

Painful tenure

Musk ownership of Twitter has been viewed as both controversial and chaotic by many outsiders, and last month Musk admitted that he had fired 80 percent of Twitter’s staff, and that he only went through with his Twitter purchase because a US judge was about to force him to honour his agreement and complete the deal.

Musk also told the BBC in April that running Twitter has been “quite painful” and “a rollercoaster”, and also said also he would sell the company if the right person came along (although not for $44bn).

Meanwhile Twitter is facing increasing competition, after millions of Twitter users flocked to rival platforms, including Mastodon and Bluesky – from Twitter co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey.

Dorsey recently changed his mind about Musk and said he no longer believed that Elon Musk is the right person to lead Twitter.