Musk says he has hired new Twitter CEO

Elon Musk said he has hired a new chief executive officer (CEO) for Twitter, without naming the person who would take his job at the microblogging platform as he transitions to a different role.

Musk said in a tweet, “Excited to announce that I’ve hired a new CEO for X/Twitter. She will be starting in ~6 weeks!” He added, “My role will transition to being exec chair & CTO, overseeing product, software & sysops.”

While Musk did not reveal the new CEO’s name, NBCUniversal’s Head of Advertising, Linda Yaccarino, is in talks to become the new Twitter chief, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the situation.

Musk has been the CEO of Twitter since October last year, after buying Twitter for $44 billion in a long-drawn-out deal. 

In December, Musk conducted a Twitter poll asking users to vote if he should step down as head of the microblogging platform. About 57.5% of votes were for yes, while the remaining 42.5% rejected the idea of Musk stepping down. About 17,502,391 users voted in this poll.

In a follow-up tweet Musk said, “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.”

Twitter has witnessed a lot of change since Musk closed the $44 billion acquisition of the social media firm. 

Most recently, Twitter was merged with X Corp. Twitter no longer exists as a separate legal entity and is now wholly-owned by and absorbed into X Corp, the company building an 'everything app' to power social media, payments, e-commerce, and messaging.