When Elon Musk made a public pitch to buy out the liberal playground Twitter, the stock price became incredibly volatile. People didn’t know what way the Tech King might take the company.
Meanwhile, people with Tesla became nervous that he would forget they existed. In one fell swoop, he took over Twitter and bought out every other shareholder, and the worst fears of Tesla employees came true. He started neglecting the very company that made him a household name (unlike PayPal).
The patience of the tech world has been rewarded as Musk has chosen a new CEO for Twitter. While he has yet to announce who “she” is, he did announce via tweet that she will be starting shortly. “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.” An announcement of this magnitude took many by surprise.
While Tesla stock rose at the news of their beloved leader shifting his focus back to Tesla, it has the potential to create major problems over at Twitter.
Twitter is the modern-day equivalent of the town square. Everyone who wants to speak up had a voice, and should they choose to use that voice the wrong way, they can easily find themselves unable to speak there again. While unlike the abomination that the Facebook and Instagram merger created with Meta, Twitter has largely believed in free speech. That is until President Trump was banned just after the January 6th riots at the Capitol.
When Musk made the deal to purchase Twitter, he vowed to bring back President Trump and others who had been banned without just cause. Since then, he has done just that and the American people as a whole could not be more thrilled. A change to restore the freedom of speech and not restrict content in the name of advertisers or to keep celebrities on the platform has been a genius move.
Selling people their beloved “verified” check boxes has brought in waves of cash and the company is becoming closer to being truly profitable for the first time in ages. Then again, the firing of 80% of the Twitter workforce, many of whom were largely redundant positions, doesn’t hurt the bottom line, either.
As of this moment, NBCUniversal head of advertising Linda Yaccarino has already announced her departure from the company, and many have tagged her to become the CEO of Twitter. Her business acumen places her strongly in the running for an amazing CEO. Unfortunately, as her advertising practices at NBCUniversal have shown, she is more in touch with the feminine message.
This will likely mean a shift in the algorithm to push feminine issues as well as the return of Twitter to nothing more than a glorified gossip column. Much like the grocery store check-out line papers, the tabloid-like headlines and tweets will be grabbing more eyeballs than the facts once again.
Musk and his new CEO will certainly maintain the company’s word and not do something stupid like removing Trump or others to curry favor with advertisers. This leaves many having to wonder what her long game will be for the company. Given the propensity of many new CEOs to try and make drastic changes, with her taking over for the owner who will also still be involved, she may be on a tight leash.
A gossip column spreading across the globe via Twitter isn’t something new, but those stories have always been choked out. Now, in these unprecedented and trying times both for Twitter as a company and for the US as a nation, many must wonder just how much change we can take. As of now, most of the changes with Biden in office have been failures. Here’s hoping “she” is the golden egg that Musk is offering us.
