Elon Musk says he has hired new CEO of Twitter

Twitter has hired a new CEO, Elon Musk announced on Thursday on the social media site.

Mr Musk said that the as of yet unnamed executive, who is a woman, will take over the social network in roughly six weeks.

“My role will transition to being exec chair & CTO, overseeing product, software & sysops,” the billionaire added in a tweet about the announcement.

The new executive will also lead X, the future parent company of Mr Musk’s various ventures, which the billionaire has said he will use to turn Twitter into an “everything app” with a variety of services beyond social networking.

Linda Yaccarino, head of advertising at NBCUniversal, is reportedly in talks to take over the CEO role at Twitter, the Wall Street Journal reports, citing two unnamed people familiar with the situation.

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Ms Yaccarino, who has been with NBCU for more than a decade, helped launch the company’s Peacock streaming channel.

The Independent has contacted NBCU for comment.

The new hire is the latest shakeup at Twitter, which has had a turbulent run since Mr Musk bought the company for $44bn in October after months of legal fighting.

Since then, he has fired thousands of Twitter of employees, and has been candid about the struggles of the company, which he said in late 2022 was losing as much as $4m per day.

“The pain level of Twitter has been extremely high,” Mr Musk told the BBC earlier this year. “This hasn’t been some sort of party.”

The cuts included gutting the network’s teams of content moderators, leading critics to worry that Mr Musk’s vision of an online public square with few speech restrictions would allow hateful content to flourish.

Under Mr Musk, Twitter has also reinstated the banned or suspended accounts of transphobic tweeters, as well as high-profile figures like Donald Trump and Kanye West who had been removed for inciting violence and posting antisemitic messages, respectively.

In addition to changes at the top, new features and content are heading to the social network.

Twitter released an encrypted direct messaging system on Wednesday, though it was panned by security experts as being full of flaws.

“I’m trying to be positive about Twitter deploying encrypted DMs even though there are so many things about this system that make it feel like a v0.1 release, or are just obnoxious,” Matthew Green, a cryptographer and computer science professor at Johns Hopkins University, wrote on Twitter.

The Independent