Elon Musk hires mystery woman as new CEO of X Corp and Twitter

Elon Musk has announced that a new CEO for X Corp and Twitter has finally been chosen. We just don’t know who it is yet.

“Excited to announce that I’ve hired a new CEO for X/Twitter. She will be starting in ~6 weeks,” Musk said on Twitter.

Musk has confirmed that he would be staying on in several other roles.

“My role will transition to being exec chair & CTO, overseeing product, software & sysops.”

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.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 11, 2023

We don’t know who the mystery incumbent is yet, though the Wall Street Journal has theorised its Linda Yaccarino – the chairman of global advertising and partnerships at NBCU.

Regardless of who it is, they certainly have a huge mess to clean up.

Musk first mentioned stepping down as Twitter’s CEO during a court case back in November. But this was more widely publicised after a December Twitter poll, created by Musk, resulted in 57.5% of users voting for him to step down.

This took place after a long string of issues cropped up on the platform after Musk took over in October.

Bugs, releasing features and then removing them, briefly banning competitors and months of question marks around Twitter Blue and paying for check marks have become the norm since then.

Musk even went after Apple at one point, calling its App Store commission a “secret’ despite it being very publicly reported on and highlighted by regulators for years.

In addition to that, the company has been dealing with mass layoffs, as well as long hours being expected from remaining employees.

And let’s not forget that Musk didn’t actually want to buy Twitter. He was sued into it.

Passing the poisoned Twitter chalice

Musk perhaps said it best himself back in December:

“I will resign as CEO as soon as I find someone foolish enough to take the job!”

I will resign as CEO as soon as I find someone foolish enough to take the job! After that, I will just run the software & servers teams.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 21, 2022

Indeed. It’s rather difficult to not see this as a poison chalice, particularly considering how Musk has treated loyal employees in the past.

Esther Crawford was a product manager at Twitter, heading up the messy and controversial Twitter Blue subscription service. Despite the slew of issues since Musk took over, Crawford was loyal, even when he was coming under fire for changes to Twitter and employee treatment.

She even tweeted about sleeping in the office.

“When your team is pushing round the clock to make deadlines sometimes you #SleepWhereYouWork,” she said at the time.

“…doing hard things requires sacrifice (time, energy, etc). I have teammates around the world who are putting in the effort to bring something new to life so it’s important to me to show up for them & keep the team unblocked.”

Crawford was let go in a fresh wave of layoffs back in February.