Elon Musk Recruits World Economic Forum Member as New Twitter CEO

What an absolute cluster.

Elon Musk has found his replacement as Twitter chief executive and has announced she will start at the social media platform in about six weeks, with a US advertising executive tipped to take the role.

Twitter’s owner and chief executive said in December he was stepping down as soon as he found someone “foolish enough to take the job”. Musk said on Thursday that the wait was over, as he tweeted: “Excited to announce that I’ve hired a new CEO for X/Twitter. She will be starting in ~6 weeks!”

Musk did not name the executive but the Wall Street Journal reported that NBCUniversal’s global head of advertising, Linda Yaccarino, is in talks to take on the role. NBCUniversal, the entertainment conglomerate behind the NBC TV network and the Universal film studio, announced on Friday that Yaccarino had left the business but did not reveal if she was moving to a new role elsewhere.

Excited to announce that I’ve 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.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 11, 2023

First of all, World Economic Forum membership notwithstanding (I’ll get to that in a moment), this woman’s role at NBCUniversal — one of the most pernicious corporate media conglomerates to have polluted American political discourse for decades — should disqualify her.

But whatever. People are easily impressed by Fortune 500 CEOs.

The more unforgivable item on this woman’s resume is her role with the World Economic Forum.

Why would Musk potentially make a WEF member the CEO of Twitter? pic.twitter.com/imHUTfOQU3

— Just.A.Thought 💭 (@e_galv) May 12, 2023

Via Business Today:

Apart from being the chairman of global advertising and partnerships at NBCU, Yaccarino is the Chairman of the WEF’s Taskforce on Future of Work and sits on the WEF’s Media, Entertainment and Culture Industry Governors Steering Committee.

From her LinkedIn profile:

The free speech sheen is rapidly eroding off of Twitter. Elon Musk pledged that it would become a free speech platform when he took it over, and little by little he has undermined his own purported ideal with poor decision-making.

First, he refused to allow Alex Jones back on the platform due to, according to Elon, a personal beef about dead kids (the censors always hide behind dead children). Later, he banned Kanye West for a dubious violation of Twitter policy. And he kicked the guy off the platform who was tracking his private-jet gallivanting.

Those are just a few of the most high-profile instances of Musk violating his self-professed free speech ethos. The list of censorship in the short few months since he took over could go on for a while.

(As a side note, this is the problem with placing trust in a single fallible person to protect rights; at the end of the day, personal interest and bias almost always win out over principle.)

Whatever Elon’s scheming with his new WEF puppet doesn’t bode well for the future of free speech on Twitter.