Twitter owner Elon Musk said on Thursday that he had identified the person who will replace him as CEO of Twitter: he didn’t name names, but used a female pronoun to indicate her, implying that it will probably be a woman.
Since buying Twitter in late October, Musk has held nearly every high-powered role at the company, including CEO, president and Chief Technology Officer (CTO). Now he has specified that he will in any case keep the title of executive president and that of CTO for himself, continuing to make decisions on the technological aspects of the platform. In practice, this will mean that Musk will most likely retain a large part of the influence he currently has on Twitter. Instead, the new CEO should focus on business decisions, including the management of the company’s human and economic resources.
The person in question should start work in about a month and a half: according to various sources it will be Linda Yaccarino, the current head of advertising and partnerships for NBCUniversal, one of the largest media and entertainment companies in the world. The Wall Street Journal wrote that Yaccarino is interviewing for the job, and media and tech journalist Dylan Byers he said that she heard the same thing from multiple sources close to her. Yaccarino has been trying to get the position of CEO of Twitter for some time: he recently did a very positive interview with Musk, and has repeatedly tweeted that he wants a closer relationship between NBCUniversal and Twitter.
The announcement of a person to replace Musk on Twitter was long overdue: in December the entrepreneur had asked in a public poll on his profile if he should resign as head of Twitter, promising that he would respect the result of the poll. Most users had voted in favor of his resignation, but many had speculated that he would only resign as CEO, as he had repeatedly hinted, while retaining ownership of the company.
Added to this is the fact that in December the investors of Tesla – the electric car company owned by Musk and which generates most of his assets – openly asked him to cede control of the social network, placing the blame that the automaker’s stock price had fallen a lot to Musk spending so much of his time on Twitter. There’s also been a lot of discussion in recent months about how Musk’s focus on Twitter is affecting the other companies he heads, including SpaceX, Neuralink, and The Boring Company.
