Woke up this morning to my phone buzzing with the same story from about six different people, which is usually a sign something actually happened and not just some blue-check main character moment. Elon Musk posted last night that he's hired a new CEO for Twitter. He didn't say who. Just that "she" will start in about six weeks and he'll move over to executive chairman and CTO, focusing on product, software and sysops (his words, more or less).
No name yet as I'm typing this, but everyone's already pointing at Linda Yaccarino, the ad chief over at NBCUniversal who's basically spent her whole career convincing brands to keep spending money on TV even as everyone cord-cuts. If that's who it turns out to be, it's a pretty telling pick. Twitter's real problem since October hasn't been the product, it's been advertisers running for the exits. Put an ad-sales veteran in the chair and it reads less like "new product vision" and more like "please, someone, fix the money."
I'll just say the obvious thing nobody wants to say out loud: this job is terrible. You'd be reporting to a guy who fires people over tweets, who's rewritten the verification system twice in six months (I still have people in my mentions with a blue check they paid $8 for and a gold check that means something completely different, and I've genuinely given up explaining the distinction to my mom), and who treats the product roadmap like a group chat he's typing into at 2am. Whoever takes this has to know exactly what they're walking into. Maybe that's fine if you're getting paid enough and you don't actually care about the site, you just want to fix the balance sheet and take the win. That's probably closer to the real job description anyway.
Small tangent because I can't help myself: I was at a work dinner a couple weeks back and somebody asked, completely sincerely, "wait, is Twitter even still a real company?" Which, yes, technically. But I knew what they meant. The vibe of the place from the outside sits somewhere between a fire sale and a fraternity house at 3am. A new CEO doesn't fix vibes. Vibes are stickier than org charts.
Also worth mentioning, since it's eaten half my feed this week too: Google had its I/O keynote yesterday and threw about nine hundred things at the wall, PaLM 2, a Bard relaunch with the waitlist finally gone, that Pixel Fold that costs more than my first car ($1,799, if you're curious, and yes I said that number out loud in my kitchen like an idiot), a Magic Editor thing in Google Photos that does scarily good object removal. I'm not going to do the full rundown here, because I can guarantee every other tech blog on the internet is running that exact post this week. I'd rather talk about the Twitter thing, since at least it's a little less predictable and a lot more fun to be nosy about.
Anyway. Six weeks from now we'll know for sure who's actually in the chair, and I'll be mildly surprised if it's not Yaccarino at this point given how confidently everyone's reporting it. What I'm more curious about is whether Musk actually lets go of day-to-day the way he's promising. He's said this kind of absolute thing before and walked it back within a month, more than once. I've put a note in my calendar to check back on this in July and see how it's actually going. My money's on him still being the one tweeting about outages at 1am regardless of what the org chart says.