Elon Musk hires new Twitter CEO, says she will start in 6 weeks

Twitter owner Elon Musk on Friday announced the hiring of a new Twitter chief executive officer who will be starting in six weeks.

While Musk didn't disclose the name of the person, he said Twitter's new CEO is a woman.

After the new CEO takes over Twitter, the billionaire said his role will transition to being executive chairman and chief technology officer (CTO), overseeing product, software and system operations.

According to U.S. media reports, Twitter's new CEO could be Linda Yaccarino, chairman of global advertising and partnership at NBC Universal.

The change of guard at Twitter comes months after Musk said he will resign as CEO of Twitter as soon as he finds his replacement.

"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 & servers teams," Musk had said in December last year.

Prior to this, Musk had asked Twitter users in a poll whether he should step down as head of Twitter. About 57.5% of users had voted 'Yes'.

The Tesla CEO bought Twitter for $44 billion in October last year. The microblogging platform's acquisition concluded after a long legal battle, which saw many flip-flops by Musk, forcing Twitter to move to court against him. Musk had first proposed to buy out Twitter in April 2022. He later tried to back out of the deal, citing Twitter's inability to provide data on spam or fake accounts on its platform.

In April, Musk admitted that he only went through with the acquisition because a U.S. court was about to force him to buy Twitter.

According to the billionaire, running Twitter has been 'quite painful'. "It's been quite difficult. I'd say the pain level of Twitter has been extremely high. This hasn't been some sort of party, so it's been really quite a stressful situation for the last several months," Musk told the BBC in an interview.

He, however, added that Twitter is headed to a 'good place'. "We're roughly break-even, I think we're trending towards being cash flow positive very soon, literally in a matter of months. The advertisers are returning. I think the quality of recommended tweets has improved significantly, and we've taken a lot of feedback from people that have looked at the open source recommendation algorithm, and we've made a lot of improvements even since that was made open source and we're going to keep doing that. So overall, I think the trend is very good," he said.

When asked whether he would sell the platform to someone who offers $44 billion, Musk said it depends on the buyer. "I suppose if I was confident that they would rigorously pursue the truth, then I guess I would be glad to hand it off to someone else. I don't care about the money, really, but I do want to have some source of truth that I can count on," he said.