Billionaire Elon Musk leaves behind 'mess' for Twitter's new CEO

On May 11, Elon Musk announced that Twitter would soon have a new CEO to replace him. According to CNBC, the person taking this position will be Linda Yaccarino - former head of advertising business at NBCUniversal. The new CEO will have to clean up the mess that Twitter has been in recently.

The first challenge that Musk’s recent reign has left his successor with is Twitter’s financial mess. The $13 billion bank loan it took to buy Twitter has left the company struggling financially. After acquiring Twitter last year, Elon Musk said the company was weeks away from bankruptcy and that his top priority was revenue. Twitter’s 2021 earnings — its most recent full-year results before the delisting — showed the company losing money, with a net loss of $221.4 million.

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Musk has proposed new measures to improve the situation by making users pay for blue ticks. The Twitter CEO is still handing out blue “checks” for free due to poor uptake of the service, so his successor will need to come up with a backup plan to address this.

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Not only that, half of Twitter's top 100 advertisers paused advertising a month after Musk took over, so the same thing could happen again.

Twitter also faces competition from other platforms. While users are unhappy with Twitter under Musk, some competitors have taken the opportunity to promote their platforms on Twitter. For example, Mastodon - a decentralized social media service, or Bluesky - a social network backed by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey. Meanwhile, online platform Substack has launched a Twitter-like feature called Notes.

The culture Musk brought to the office did not sit well with employees. Although he stepped down as CEO, he planned to maintain control as executive chairman and chief technology officer. Musk’s outsized influence would put pressure on the new CEO.

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