Elon Musk is the owner of Twitter, but he’s also been serving as the CEO. This isn’t a foreign role to him. He’s the chief executive of Tesla and SpaceX, as well as a major stakeholder in both.
But shortly after taking over Twitter in October 2022, Musk suggested that he would, in fact, hire someone to relieve him of CEO duties.
“Should I step down as head of Twitter?” Musk tweeted on Dec. 18, 2022. “I will abide by the results of this poll.” 17 million users voted and 57.5%—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 exec chair & 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.
Who’s who on Twitter’s next CEO list?
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.