Less than two months into his $44 billion purchase of Twitter, Elon Musk declared that whoever took over as the company\u2019s CEO \u201c must like pain a lot.\u201d Then he promised he\u2019d step down as soon as he found a replacement \u201cfoolish enough\u201d to want the job.
That person, Musk announced Friday, is Linda Yaccarino, a highly-regarded advertising executive from NBCUniversal. She\u2019ll start in six weeks. How long she\u2019ll last might depend on her pain tolerance.
When Musk tweeted on Thursday that he\u2019s found a new CEO but didn\u2019t say who, one word stuck out: \u201cshe.\u201d Some of his more extreme Twitter followers took immediate issue with the new CEO\u2019s gender, but the fact that Musk hired a woman is actually notable simply because it is so rare \u2014 in business overall and especially in the tech industry \u2014 to see female chief executives.
Her appointment renewed questions about the \u201cglass cliff,\u201d a theory that women \u2014 as well as underrepresented minorities \u2014 are more likely to be hired for leadership jobs when there\u2019s a crisis, which sets them up for failure. The term was coined in 2005 by University of Exeter professors Michelle Ryan and Alex Haslam, and there have been plenty of famous examples since then, from Yahoo\u2019s Marissa Mayer to the U.K.\u2019s Theresa May.
Could Yaccarino be headed toward it?
\u201cHer credentials are impeccable and she\u2019s been extremely successful so far. But she\u2019s also been in settings where her success was achievable,\u201d said Jo-Ellen Pozner, a business professor at Santa Clara University who studies corporate governance. \u201cI mean no disrespect to her or to diminish her in the least. I just think that this is an impossible situation for basically anybody.\u201d
Whether or not she succeeds depends in part on how much Musk is willing to step back from Twitter\u2019s day-to-day operations. The Tesla and SpaceX CEO said he will continue to serve as Twitter\u2019s executive chairman \u2014 Yaccarino\u2019s boss \u2014 as well as its chief technology officer, reporting to her. He added that Yaccarino \u201cwill focus primarily on business operations.\u201d
From the moment Yaccarino\u2019s name was confirmed, advertising industry experts hailed the decision as a good one \u2014 perhaps the only one \u2014 to steer Twitter toward stability and profitability. Yaccarino oversaw NBCUniversal\u2019s market strategy and advertising revenue for its broadcast, cable and digital assets, which totaled nearly $10 billion. In comparison, Twitter\u2019s final quarterly revenue as a public company, reported in July, was just $1.17 billion.
\u201cShe is exactly what Twitter needs to start rebuilding advertiser trust, bring back big advertisers and really start improving Twitter\u2019s ad business,\u201d said Jasmine Enberg, an analyst at Insider Intelligence who follows Twitter. \u201cThat said, there are still a lot of challenges and Yaccarino is going to have her hands full from day one.\u201d
Musk\u2019s tenure at Twitter\u2019s helm has been chaotic at best. He began his first day firing the company\u2019s top executives, followed by roughly 80% of its staff. This has meant that Twitter has far fewer engineers to ensure that the site is running smoothly and far fewer content moderators to help rid it of hate speech, animal cruelty and graphic violence.
He\u2019s upended the platform\u2019s verification system and has scaled back safeguards against the spread of misinformation. It\u2019s been some of these changes \u2014 along with Musk\u2019s own penchant for spreading misinformation and engaging with prominent conspiracy theorists and far-right figures \u2014 that analysts say soured many advertisers on the platform.
\u201cElon Musk has been telling us for months repeatedly that Twitter\u2019s problems are the result of advertisers pulling away. But that\u2019s not the source of his problems. Advertisers pulling away are a symptom of the problems at Twitter. He\u2019s created chaos. He\u2019s eliminated internal controls. He\u2019s eliminated critical functions like content moderation. He\u2019s made the user experience very unpredictable. He\u2019s allowed dangerous voices to flourish,\u201d Pozner said. \u201cNobody \u2014 man, woman, alien \u2014 is going to be able to right this ship given these circumstances.\u201d
The glass cliff theory holds up in business as well as politics, and, according to a 2011 Harvard Business Review report, \u201cdoes not seem to apply to organizations with a history of female leaders.\u201d
Twitter, like most tech companies, does not have a strong history of female leaders. Its founders were all men, as were all five of its CEOs, including Musk. While female chief executives are rare across industries, they are exceptionally rare in tech. Of the 340 CEOs in a recent survey of S&P 500 companies, 18 were women, up from 16 in 2020. In tech, prominent female CEOs include Oracle\u2019s Safra Catz and chipmaker AMD\u2019s Lisa Su.
Yaccarino seems ready to go head-to-head with Musk, though it\u2019s not clear how that\u2019ll play out. In a recent on-stage interview with him, she asked Musk if he could commit to not tweeting after 3 a.m. Agreeing that he\u2019s \u201cgotten myself in trouble a few times\u201d with late night\/early morning tweets, he responded with a noncommittal \u201cI will aspire to tweet less at 3 a.m.\u201d
She also asked Musk if he\u2019s open to let advertisers \u201cinfluence\u201d his vision for Twitter, in \u201cproduct development, ad safety, content moderation\u201d so they could get more excited about investing in the platform.
Musk quickly shut her down.
\u201cIt\u2019s totally cool to say that you want to have your advertising appear in certain places in Twitter and not in other places, but it is not cool to to try to say what Twitter will do,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd if that means losing advertising dollars, we lose it. But freedom of speech is paramount.\u201d
Regaining advertisers\u2019 trust will require stabilizing Twitter and ensuring that key product decisions are made thoughtfully and deliberately and not, as Musk has often been known to do, on the spur of the moment, inspired by a fan\u2019s tweet or a passing thought. Industry insiders describe Yaccarino as extremely capable, with a proven track record and impressive resume.
But if she\u2019s to succeed on the business side, she\u2019ll need Musk\u2019s buy-in on the product side.
\u201cIt is really debatable whether or not he\u2019s going to hand the reins over entirely to Yaccarino,\u201d Enberg said \u201cAnd a lot of Twitter\u2019s success from here on out really depends on what he decides in terms of that.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n