Billionaire investor Elon Musk will be stepping down as chief executive of Twitter and taking on other roles in the company. The owner of the microblogging platform revealed he has hired a new CEO, media executive Linda Yaccarino, who should be at the helm of the social media giant in less than two months’ time.
Elon Musk to Leave CEO Post at Twitter and Become Company’s CTO
Entrepreneur Elon Musk announced he has found someone to replace him as chief executive officer (CEO) of Twitter, making good on a promise to the social network’s users. In a tweet on Thursday, he also said he is staying with the company but in other executive roles.
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
The new CEO, whose identity Musk did not unveil in his initial post, will be on the job within a few weeks while the current head will take responsibilities as executive chairman and chief technology officer overseeing product, software and system operations.
In another tweet on Friday, he revealed that the chosen one is longtime media executive Linda Yaccarino, who will primarily focus on the business side of things while Musk prefers to concentrate on products and technologies.
Yaccarino had already announced she was departing Comcast’s mass media conglomerate NBCUniversal, where she headed advertising and partnerships. She spent over a decade there after working as executive vice president and chief operating officer of advertising sales, marketing and acquisitions at Turner Broadcasting.
The angel investor bought Twitter for $44 billion in October 2022 and has been running it since, while insisting that’s a temporary occupation. After the acquisition, he immediately embarked on organizational restructuring.
This included massive layoffs to cut costs. He later explained that it “turns out you don’t need all that many people to run Twitter … If you don’t care that much about censorship, then you can really let go [of a] lot of people.”
While managing Twitter, Musk also implemented significant policy changes, some of which have been met with criticism. He has been trying to convince users to become paid subscribers and advertisers to return to the platform.
“I will resign as CEO as soon as I find someone foolish enough to take the job!” Musk tweeted in December, vowing to just run the software and servers teams after that. The pledge came after the majority of participants in a Twitter poll, which he himself created, asked him to step down.
Despite previously stating he does not want to be the CEO of any company and that he views himself as an engineer, Elon Musk remains the top executive of U.S. electric car maker Tesla and spacecraft manufacturer Spacex.
In March 2023, the tech entrepreneur registered a company called X.AI Corp which, according to a filing in Nevada, has him as director. In an interview in April, Musk announced he plans to create his own artificial intelligence (AI) platform called “Truthgpt” to rival the offerings of tech giants in the field.
Do you think Elon Musk will continue to be directly involved in determining Twitter’s policies after his resignation? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.
