New CEO for Twitter

Sahail Ashraf posted on 29 May 2023

Twitter has been through umpteen changes over the last year. Now it has a new CEO arriving. How is the platform changing this time?

There is to be a new CEO for Twitter. This means Elon Musk will not be in charge of the operation on a daily basis (he will still sit on the board). Will this change anything? Will Twitter become the beloved platform it used to be?

Who knows.

Well, we kind of know. But before we get into it, we just need to remind everyone that, since Musk took over Twitter, he has shed over 80% of the staff there. That means he is either cruel or someone who is genuinely trying to change the business for good. And whatever he has put in place now will likely still be around for years to come.

So what has Musk done?

Musk drastically changed Twitter. He fired all of those people, for a start. But he also did many other things that have permanently changed both the platform and the users on it.

Recently, however, he has been making noises about video. It seems he wants to make Twitter a platform that carries a lot of video. Last year, he tweeted that he saw his buying of Twitter as an ‘accelerant’ to an ‘everything app’ he referred to as X. This may not mean that Twitter is going to become X any time soon. But it does mean that his thinking is very much focussed on a certain goal.

Musk likes video because he knows it is a great engine for a social media website. It’s consumed quicker and at a larger volume. Musk sees TikTok and thinks that he can get a bit of that action.

However, Musk has that X app thing in his brain. He knows that if he is able to change the way people use Twitter, he is one step closer to making the dream real. 

Enter The Carlson

Tucker Carlson is a right-wing thinker and he is very good at getting people all stirred up. Twitter is about to host his show. 

This is the intriguing part about how Twitter is changing. It’s quite likely that Carlson being on Twitter will just be the beginning. As time goes on, Twitter will start to introduce more broadcasts, and this will pave the way towards it becoming an everything app.

Musk has always talked about how he wants to champion free speech on the platform, and  a recent Twitter blog post discussed content moderation:

Our mission at Twitter 2.0 is to promote and protect the public conversation. We believe Twitter users have the right to express their opinions and ideas without fear of censorship. We also believe it is our responsibility to keep users on our platform safe from content violating our Rules. 

While it may seem like Twitter is moving towards a streaming service, it may well have to be extra careful. With Carlson, some nasty opinions could slip out and cause serious problems for the company.

It seems Musk likes his accelerants.

The future 

The new CEO is bound to be someone who will look at what is going on, and help push Musk’s mission for the everything app project. Linda Yaccarino has come over from NBC and Musk announced her appointment on the 12th of May.

Yaccarino has vast experience in ad-supported companies, so should be able to help reverse Twitter’s revenue woes. But it’s also a sign that Musk is stepping back (he said he is going to focus on the product, not the operations). We anticipate the everything app to be here sooner rather than later. Carlson’s got a show on Twitter now, and Yaccarino has come over from TV. Twitter is changing.

Watch this space.

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