In typical fashion, Elon Musk made a major announcement about Twitter via tweet on Thursday without providing complete details — which, again, might have been handled differently if he had a PR department.
Just before 1 p.m. Pacific Time Thursday, Musk announced that he's hired a new CEO for Twitter, and all we knew at first was her gender and vague start date.
"Excited to announce that I’ve hired a new CEO for X/Twitter. She will be starting in ~6 weeks!" Musk wrote. "My role will transition to being exec chair & CTO, overseeing product, software & sysops."
The move has been expected, and Musk himself indicated back in December that he might step down from the CEO role soonish — though he also said at one point that it could take a full year for him to do so.
"~6 weeks" puts in early summer, and no doubt the tech-world rumor mill is going to produce a name right quick. This person, whoever she is, may still be in the process of giving notice wherever she currently works.
By Friday, the world had learned that the new CEO is Linda Yaccarino, who is the current chair of global advertising and partnerships at Comcast NBCUniversal. As CNN reports, Yaccarino put out a statement Friday morning announcing her departure.
And, as CNN notes, "The choice of Yaccarino may hint at Musk recognizing the limitations of his efforts to make Twitter less dependent on advertising." Musk may have just recently met Yaccarino when the two of them appeared in April at an industry conference in Miami for a keynote session entitled “Twitter 2.0: From Conversations to Partnerships.” That was the same conference at which someone paid for a banner to be flown by a plane overhead that said "Musk Is Bad for Business #StopToxicTwitter."
Musk's appearance at the conference was also a signal that he would like to woo advertisers back to Twitter, even while he's buddying up with the likes of ad-toxic racist Tucker Carlson, which could be seen as working at cross-purposes.
As The Verge wrote upon hearing the news of a CEO hire, "It seems unlikely that giving someone else one specific title will make Twitter any less of a wild ride." Musk, after all, is the owner and has run the company for the last seven months according to his own whims, grievances, and methods of cost-cutting.
Musk's offer to buy Twitter just over a year ago was, itself, some sort of whim. Because as it turned out, once he thought better of it and looked at some numbers, he did everything he could to try to back out of the deal for four months, going so far as to let the case go to the Delaware Court of Chancery, where business disputes like this get hashed out. Musk declined to pay a $1 billion penalty, and so here we are.
Twitter co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey, who at one point sounded supportive of Musk's takeover before he himself resigned from the company's board, recently posted to his new social platform Bluesky that Musk "should have walked away and paid the $1b."
Hiring Yaccarino also follows a pattern of Musk putting women in charge of his companies, even if it may be in name only. As CNN notes, Musk made Robyn Denholm CEO of Tesla after his dustup with the SEC, but Denholm "has kept a low profile at Tesla, not speaking at an investor day earlier this year at which 15 other Tesla executives in addition to Musk spoke."
In the absence of a name for the new CEO, the memes began — and the joke below may not be far from the future truth.
The new CEO of Twitter: pic.twitter.com/t4Z3B2nwse
— Fintwit (@fintwit_news) May 11, 2023
Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
This post has been updated throughout following Yaccarino's announcement.