Twitter has a new CEO. In an announcement via his Twitter feed, Elon Musk the current Twitter CEO and owner said he was scaling back his involvement in the company.
“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,” Musk said.
Elon Musk will remain the majority shareholder at Twitter and will be the one that sets the general direction. This move likely means he would like to focus on the Software development side which has been seeing a lot of changes lately.
Musk also has interests in other companies and this move may be to allow him to give his other ventures attention. In the recent past, SpaceX has been doing test launchers for its Starlink project.
One thing that stood out is $TESLA stock prices rose after the news.
Twitter CEO Will be Female
The announcement that the new CEO is female immediately ruled out any male contenders that had been mooted before. However, it then brought about speculation on who was the new CEO.
Currently, the rumour mills seem to favour NBCUniversal’s head of advertising Linda Yaccarino, with the Wall Street Journal reporting that talks are underway.
Ms. Yaccarino has been a staunch supporter of Elon Musk. Only recently, Ms. Yaccarino had a chance to interview him on TV. During Musk’s takeover of Twitter, he found little support in the media but this is what Ms. Yaccarino had to say:
“He can learn advertising,” Yaccarino said. “Give me a break, I think we can teach him.” And Yaccarino encouraged the ad industry to be part of that solution.
Twitter which has been relying on advertising revenue, is struggling to bring back advertisers on the platform. The current forecast by insider intelligence is a 28% decline in ad revenue for the current financial year.
Ms. Yaccarino has experience in advertising, media, and streaming and has spoken in support of freedom of speech. All this makes her aligned with the direction Elon Musk wants to take the giant social media platform.
Twitter has been experiencing changes and this is just another one for the company.