Elon Musk announced that he has hired a new CEO for his social media platform X/Twitter and she will be starting in six (6) weeks. The Twitter owner however says his role “will transition to being exec chair & CTO, overseeing product, software & sysops.”
The billionaire in December held a poll asking if he should step down as the head of Twitter following backlash to a new policy banning ‘free promotion’ of rival platforms. He lost it with 57.5% of 17,502,391 people voting in favor of him stepping down. Musk however said he will step down as Twitter’s CEO after finding someone “foolish enough” to take on the position and it seems he has finally found her.
“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 and servers teams,” Musk tweeted at the time.
Under Musk’s leadership of Twitter, a social site he acquired for $44 billion in late October last year, the online platform has seen numerous changes some of which triggered chaos and drove major advertisers away. From laying off half of the company workforce to reinstating the account of former President Trump, the CEO also introduced a paid verification service whose initial launch led to impersonations of high-profile brands before it was temporarily suspended.
His leadership has also led to the axing of Covid-19 misinformation rules and the banning of an account that tracked the location of his private jet which he followed up with a mass suspension of the journalists who reported on the ban and later tried to ban users from linking or mentioning their usernames to a number of rival social platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, and others.
Musk’s Twitter also shut down almost all free access to the Twitter API and introduced a new fee structure for API access that could cost some enterprises as much as $42,000 per month, removed the ability to see which device a tweet is from, introduced public views count and bookmarks, among other unnecessary UI changes.
