After about half a year since Elon Musk bought Twitter and took the company private, the billionaire announced he will no longer be the media platform’s CEO, putting the company under female supervision
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With a vague intriguing tweet, Elon Musk announced that he has chosen a person to succeed him as chief executive of Twitter. Although he did not name the new CEO, Musk mentioned the new boss is a “she.”
However, the journalists of a few media including the Financial Times (FT) and the New York Times have already quoted unnamed sources to suggest that Elon Musk is in talks to hire Linda Yaccarino, NBCUniversal’s head of advertising.
Yaccarino has worked for NBCUniversal for over a decade, actively advocating for better ways to measure the effectiveness of advertising. As head of NBCU’s advertising sales, she was a key figure in the launch of the company’s ad-supported Peacock streaming service.
The extravagant billionaire who overtook Twitter in October 2022 after a lengthy “to buy or not to buy” dealmaking process will himself “transition to being exec chair & CTO, overseeing product, software & sysops.”
Both Twitter investors and Tesla shareholders have been keen for Musk to select new management as soon as possible. Earlier, Mr Musk also conducted a Twitter poll asking if he should step down as a CEO, with the majority of followers voting in favour of the management change.
Since Mr Musk became the ‘Chief Twit’, around 90% of the company’s employees have been either fired or have quit themselves. The platform still deals with a huge debt connected to the $44 billion acquisition deal. Advertisers have also massively retracted from the platform, plagued with erratic changes, including the abandonment of the “verified” blue check marks and allowing anyone to purchase a “verified” badge.
Major changes have also occurred in Twitter’s features and strategy. The big plan is for the service to become a super app, covering various types of services and media tools.
One of the main corporate efforts is for the company to enter the payments market. Twitter has already introduced a subscriptions feature enabling users to monetize content and launched Coins feature with Stripe payments, allowing traders to receive real-time data on the state of affairs in the cryptocurrency market and reward users for posting publications.
Besides, the company is actively exploring blockchain opportunities, experimenting with a bot that aims to determine a ‘fair price’ on NFTs and enabling crypto trading via eToro.
Currently, Twitter is purging inactive accounts that have had “no activity at all for several years” to release desired user names and update the platform’s stats. Besides, the media giant is piloting Encrypted Direct Messages, now available for its verified users.
