It’s time for Elon Musk to listen to his customers and finally step back from the CEO role at the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.
Bill George, an executive fellow with the Harvard Business School and leading expert on management, believes there is no better time than now to let Linda Yaccarino fulfill the assignment he originally handed her: running his company.
As a result of constant turmoil, including a costly rebrand to X, corporations slashed their spending on the platform in half and even reportedly insisted any ads don’t run next to Musk’s own posts.
“Now that he has the CEO of Twitter, he needs to let her restore what Twitter was, so advertisers come back,” George told CNBC Make It, arguing the manufacturing specialist was “totally out of his element” at a social media company.
“If you had to write a case study on an example of a really poor takeover of an organization, Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter would fit that perfectly well,” George said. “I don’t think he understands social media.”
Author of a book on leadership called “True North” and contributing columnist to Coins2Day, the Harvard expert warned Musk also needed to share a more specific roadmap for the future if he wanted to encourage users aggravated by his ad hoc decision-making it was worth sticking around.
Buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 4, 2022
To placate critics that fear his running Tesla, SpaceX and Twitter simultaneously pose risks to all three companies, Musk poached ad sales exec Yaccarino from NBCUniversal to take up the reins at the social media site.
Her hiring gave a healthy boost to the Tesla stock price, which suffered in the immediate aftermath of the Twitter deal.
Yet while she may be the head of what is now called “X” on paper since last month, in practice Musk sidelined his CEO as he continued to dictate policies that go far beyond his remit as titular chief product engineer.
Ceding all future communication on the platform to Yaccarino would offer the added benefit of insulating the public image of the platform overall from his own polarizing online persona, which currently is intertwined.
Musk sabotaged by enablers
Musk has been a passionate Twitter user amassing a follower base of some 150 million users, bots included.
But as a $44 billion investment vehicle—more than half of which came out of his own pocket—the mogul decided it is not fit for purpose.
As a result, he is undertaking a root-and-branch overhaul of Jack Dorsey’s 17-year-old company to transform a popular social media site into a WeChat clone offering users a wide variety of services designed to meet their daily needs.
But his Silicon Valley brand of rapidly-accelerated creative destruction repeatedly angered users and within weeks, they were already demanding he step down as CEO—a stinging humiliation for a tycoon long accustomed to enjoying success against the odds.
Like seemingly everyone on this app I have plenty of opinions about Twitter > X and figure now is a good time to open up a bit about my experience at the company.
— Esther Crawford ✨ (@esthercrawford) July 26, 2023
I tweeted for years into the void for the love of it like many of you, but after selling my startup to Twitter in… pic.twitter.com/bw7CHhk0Xg
Esther Crawford, who experienced Musk up close and personal during the first couple of months, believes Twitter was long due for an overhaul.
Yet she argued his ambitions have been sabotaged by a coterie of sycophants and enablers that hide the truth from the entrepreneur for their own benefit.
His divisive stewardship has now sparked an exodus of users, driving millions into the welcoming arms of Mark Zuckerberg of all people, another tech billionaire with a reputation for deliberately stoking divisions to drive engagement.
In the meantime, the company formerly known as Twitter continues to bleed cash and post losses. Even ARK Invest founder Cathie Wood, one of his most adoring fans, couldn’t avoid writing off half her investment in Twitter this month.