Elon Musk is finally stepping down from his CEO role at Twitter.
The man himself announced it (how else?) in a tweet on Thursday, though he didn’t reveal the name of the person who will succeed him.
« Excited to announce that I’ve hired a new CEO for X/Twitter. She will be starting in ~6 weeks, » wrote Musk.
Now, The Wall Street Journal claims that it may be Linda Yaccarino, currently the head of advertising at NBCUniversal. The decision doesn’t appear to be final as the outlet reports Yaccarino is merely « in talks » to step into the role.
If Yaccarino indeed becomes Twitter’s new CEO, it may reportedly be because of her strong relationship with marketers and ad agencies; according to the WSJ, she currently oversees roughly $13 billion in annual ad revenue. Twitter has been struggling to retain advertisers since Musk’s takeover of the platform in October last year.
Notably, it was Yaccarino who interviewed Musk in April at the Possible marketing conference in Miami, with several questions revolving around Twitter’s relationship with advertisers. « It’s totally cool to say you wanna have your advertising appear at certain places at Twitter and not other places, but it’s not cool to say what Twitter will do. And it that means losing advertising dollars, we lose it, » Musk said on stage. Check out the entire interview below.
Musk said he would step down as CEO of Twitter on several occasions, even conducting a poll on Twitter on the matter (with the votes ending up in favor of him abandoning the role). He also (jokingly, we hope) once said his dog Floki was running the company.
No matter who ends up being the new CEO of Twitter, it doesn’t seem like Musk plans to completely hand over the reins of the company. He said that his role will transition to « being exec chair and CTO, overseeing product, software & sysops. »
