Linda Yaccarino becomes New CEO of Twitter

As he transitions from a six-month code review to rebuild the company's revenue basis, Elon Musk has kept his word to step down as Twitter's CEO by naming professional media marketing expert Linda Yaccarino as the social media giant's new CEO.

Linda announced her new position and asked users and other groups for comments. She stated she was motivated by Elon Musk's "vision to create a brighter future and I am excited to help bring that vision to Twitter and transform the business together. Please continue the discussion as we jointly create Twitter 2.0.”

Linda, who spent nearly 20 years in senior advertising and marketing roles with broadcast powerhouse Turner Broadcasting System (TBS) and 11 years overseeing ad strategy with NBCUniversal Media, will begin working at the end of June and "focus primarily on business operations," according to Elon, who made the long-rumoured announcement.

Elon reiterated his oft-stated plans to develop the platform into a multifocal app environment, following the example of China's TenCent, whose WeChat ecosystem has hundreds of millions of users accessing a wide range of interconnected services. Elon is "looking forward to working with Linda to transform [Twitter] into X, the everything app," he said.

Elon said in a town hall meeting after purchasing Twitter for $61 billion (US$44 billion) late last year that it was "crazy" that content creators would use Twitter to increase traffic to their YouTube videos because that is how they make a livelihood.

WeChat users in China "basically live on it because it's so useful and helpful to your daily life," Elon claimed at the time. And it would be a huge success, in my opinion, if Twitter helped us get there or even close to it.

There are indications that Elon’s ambitious plan is moving forward, with recent reports claiming that Twitter's corporate ownership structure had been altered and that Elon had combined Twitter with a Delaware shell corporation named X Corp.

Additionally, Elon controls the domain name X.com, which was previously associated with an early foray into online banking that would later become PayPal.