Beijing, May 12 morning news, local time on Thursday, Elon Musk announced that he has found a new CEO for X Corporation / Twitter, and named the person as a woman, but did not disclose her name. Elon Musk also revealed that he will move on to become Twitter’s executive chairman and CTO in the coming weeks.
In a tweet, Elon Musk said, “Happy to announce that I’ve recruited a new CEO for Twitter, who will step in in about 6 weeks.”
Elon Musk has also not previously disclosed potential candidates for Twitter CEO, and it is unclear who he has named as his successor, but there has been a lot of speculation among various sources.
A Silicon Valley executive and former Hollywood executive who requested anonymity revealed that Linda Yaccarino, chief ad sales executive at Comcast’s NBCUniversal, could be Elon Musk’s choice for Twitter CEO.
Yaccarino is a respected advertising executive who interviewed Elon Musk at an advertising conference in Miami last month.
An NBCUniversal spokesperson responded, “Linda is in intense rehearsals for Upfront.” Upfront is an event that NBCUniversal will hold for advertisers in New York next Monday.
Some Twitter employees speculate that former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer could also be a candidate.
YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki and Shivon Zilis, an executive at Elon Musk’s brain-chip startup Neuralink, are also listed as potential candidates on Blind, the tech industry’s anonymous messaging app.
Jason Benowitz, senior fund manager at investment firm CI Roosevelt, said women executives from other Elon Elon Musk companies, such as Gwynne Shotwell, president of SpaceX, and Robyn Denholm, chairman of Tesla, are also possible candidates to become Twitter’s Elon Musk has said he is in the process of moving to a new role as CEO.
Musk said he will also serve as Twitter’s executive chairman while moving on to become CTO of Twitter.
Tesla shares closed up 2.1 percent Thursday, and analysts said the announcement would ease some investors’ concerns that Elon Musk was putting too much effort into Twitter.
The electric car stock has been battered since Elon Musk took the helm at Twitter last October.
“The anchor of Twitter is off Elon Musk’s ankle and now he can devote more time to creating value for Tesla,” said Craig Irwin, an analyst at Roth MKM.
In fact, Elon Musk has long expressed interest in finding a new CEO for Twitter.
In a poll, he launched last December, 57.5% of Twitter users voted for him to step down as CEO of the social media platform.
“I’ll step down as CEO as soon as I find someone stupid enough to take over the job,” Elon Musk said at the time.
After taking the helm of Twitter last October, the billionaire brought many changes to the social network in a short time. He quickly fired former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal and other executives, then laid off half his staff last November.
Elon Musk, a self-described free-speech absolutist, has said he bought Twitter to prevent the platform from becoming an echo chamber for hateful and divisive speech.
He also said he would “defeat” the platform’s spam bots, a major point of conflict with Twitter’s board when he bought the company for $44 billion.
