Elon Musk Announces His Pick For The Toughest Job In The World
© Courtesy of TheStreetElon Musk is in the news again.
The king of techno caused quite a stir on May 11 when he announced to everyone's surprise that he had found a CEO to replace him at the helm of Twitter.
Three months ago, the billionaire announced that he would remain at the helm of the microblogging site until the end of the year.
"I think I need to stabilize the organization and make sure it's in a good financial position and the product roadmap is clearly defined," Musk said in a February 15 remote video interview. "I think maybe at the end of this year it's time to find someone else to run the business because I think it should be in a stable position by the end of this year."
But in the end, the wait and the search went faster than expected.
"Happy to announce that I have a new CEO of X/Twitter," the tech mogul tweeted on May 11. "It starts in 6 weeks!"
The billionaire, who added that he would be moving to a more technical role, did not name his new CEO.
"My role will transition to CEO and CTO, overseeing products, software and information systems," he said.
But after 24 hours of wild rumours, the billionaire has appointed a new CEO.
Linda Yakarina
"I am very excited to welcome Blinda Yakarin as the new CEO of Twitter!" Musk announced this on May 12.
She added that she would focus "primarily on business operations, and I will be focused on developing new products and technologies."
"I look forward to working with Linda to transform this platform into X, a universal application."
Yakarin's arrival is imminent after his departure was announced earlier by his former employer, NBC Universal.
"We are grateful to Linda Iacarino for her leadership of the advertising business at NBCUniversal and for the team and innovative platform she has built," said Comcast CEO Mike Kavanagh. Over twelve years of leadership, Linda has made an invaluable contribution to the company and we wish her all the best.
"It has been an honor to be a part of Comcast NBCUniversal and to lead the most amazing team," said Yacarino. "We have transformed our company and the entire industry, and I am very proud of what we have achieved together and grateful to my colleagues and mentors."
According to her LinkedIn profile, Yakarina joined NBCU in November 2011. As of November 2020, she is the Head of Global Advertising and Partnerships.
He helped launch the Peacock streaming service and sponsored live events such as the Super Bowl and the Olympics. He was also responsible for partnerships with tech companies such as Snapchat and YouTube, which are Twitter's direct competitors.
Yakarina and Musk have a warm friendly relationship. Last month, she interviewed him on stage at a major advertising convention in Miami. He's called "dude" and "dude" on stage. Twitter and NBCU also extended their partnership to the Olympics.
X Corps
Yakarina has a big challenge ahead of her on Twitter.
He will have to stand next to the owner, who will remain at hand. Musk is currently the most influential person on Twitter with over 139 million followers. He also sees the platform as a way to expand his influence and power around the world. He sometimes promotes conspiracy theories, such as last October when he repeated false reports of a brutal attack on Paul Pelosi, the husband of Nancy Pelosi, the former Democratic speaker of the House.
Also, Musk's determination to make the platform a bastion of conservatives and a place where you can say whatever you want as long as it doesn't break the law has put off many advertisers.
He began to rush to update the platform, which cost him dearly. The billionaire will reach $13 billion to finance the deal. That debt has since been transferred to Twitter's balance sheet.
Musk has launched various initiatives to address the financial shortfall caused by the exodus of advertisers. I've integrated the blue account authentication code into Blue, Twitter's subscription service. Blue is now $7.99 per month for individuals and $1,000 per month for organizations. But in the face of protests from small businesses and nonprofits, he said they would set prices. It is unclear whether the registration took place.
Musk also launched an unprecedented austerity policy, cutting a total of 5,200 jobs, or 69.3% of Twitter's workforce, at the time of his arrival.
The billionaire changed the name of Twitter to X Holdings, which could be the parent company of all companies. He hinted that his vision for Twitter is comparable to that of X Financial Corporation, which he founded in 1999 in Palo Alto, California. X became part of the software company Confinity.com in 2000. The combined company became PayPal.
"I have a bigger vision for what I think X.com or X Corporation can be," he told Tesla shareholders during the August 2022 general meeting on Twitter. "It's a very big vision, and obviously it could have started from scratch, but I think Twitter will help accelerate it by 3-5 years."
He said he thinks he has a good idea where to send Twitter's engineering team to make it radically better and that X will be something "very good for the world."
Last June, during an internal meeting with Twitter employees, Musk made it clear that he wants Twitter to be like WeChat and TikTok if it is to reach its goal of reaching 1 billion users.
"We can just as well improve Twitter to be interesting," Musk told Twitter employees. It also seems like an important social mission of Twitter: "I think Twitter can do a much better job of informing people about serious issues."
Its model is WeChat, a Chinese app that integrates social networking, payments, gaming, messaging, flight booking, food ordering, shopping and more.
“There is no equivalent of WeChat outside of China,” Musk said. "You basically live on WeChat in China. If we can recreate that with Twitter, we'll be a big hit.
Tesla shareholders
Before Twitter, Musk was already CEO of Tesla ( TSLA ) - get a free report , founder of SpaceX and The Boring Company and co-founder of Neuralink. The billionaire also works in his own artificial intelligence company.
Focusing on Twitter, Musk has spent less time on Tesla, disappointing some shareholders and markets who see the platform as an unwanted distraction. Faced with criticism, Musk announced on December 20 that he would step down as CEO of Twitter after conducting a poll asking the platform's users to vote on whether he should continue running the company.
Almost 18 million users voted, and "Yes" won with 57.5% of the vote. Musk vowed to follow the count.
"I will resign as CEO as soon as I find someone stupid enough to take the job!" - said the billionaire on December 20. "After that, I'll just manage the software and the server teams."
