Twitter has been ablaze since Thursday when CEO Elon Musk announced on the social media platform that he is assigning a new female CEO.
It’s still a mystery exactly who this new CEO is. Everything that Musk allowed himself to divulge is summed up in one tweet, saying: “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.”
A reminder, X is Musk’s “everything app” that has been proposed by Musk to contain social media and AI, which Twitter will be folded into.
Musk has expressed in the past that he would have to wait until the end of 2023 to hire a successor and yet seems to have sped up that plan.
“I need to stabilize the organization and just make sure it’s in a financially healthy place and the product road map is clearly laid out,” Musk said at the World Government Summit in Dubai in February.
However, the fact that this new CEO is a woman is in fact relevant, because it plays into the idea that Twitter is on the way out. Theories are swirling about a glass cliff, wherein a failing company with a male CEO will appoint a new female CEO to struggle on for a year or so and pin the blame on when the company inevitably falls apart.
Edit: Elon Musk has since confirmed this new CEO to be Linda Yaccarino, former head of advertising at NBCUniversal. Theories say that her background in marketing streaming services was appealing to Musk due to his ambition to roll a streaming business into Twitter.
