Richard Ginika Izuora
Elon Musk the owner of Twitter after its take over in October 2022, and Chief Executive of Tesla and SpaceX, as well as a major stakeholder in both has concluded plans to hire someone to relieve him of CEO duties.
“Should I step down as head of Twitter?” Musk tweeted on December 18, 2022. “I will abide by the results of this poll.” 17 million users voted and 57.5 per cent or 9.8 million people voted for Musk to step aside. But until now he has given no indication that he would stay true to his word and appoint a CEO.
“Excited to announce that I’ve hired a new CEO for X/Twitter,” Musk tweeted on May 11. “She will be starting in 6 weeks, My role will transition to being Executive Chairman & CTO, overseeing product, software & sysops.” Musk did not indicate who the new Chief Executive would be, though he indicated he selected a woman.
The Wall Street Journal reports that NBCUniversal advertising head Linda Yaccarino is in talks for the job.
Tesla shares jumped after Musk made the announcement.
Back in December, Quartz crowdsourced an extensive list of potential Twitter CEOs and, admittedly, very few candidates were female.
Here are some of the women who made our list: Former Meta COO, Sheryl Sandberg, Former Wikimedia CEO Katherine Maher, Wikimedia Chief Maryana Iskander, TikTok COO Vanessa Pappas, Journalist Bari Weiss, Former Twitter sales chief Sarah Personette, and Former Twitter chief people officer Leslie Berland.
More outlandish suggestions included Meghan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex, and the fraudsters Anna Delvey and Elizabeth Holmes.
After I tweeted out a call for candidates in December, one person asked, “How about any woman?” Bingo.