Elon Musk said there is no one willing and capable of running Twitter Inc. But if he is good to his word and walks away from the top leadership position at the social media company he bought two months ago, a number of people are already raising their hands.
(Bloomberg) — Elon Musk said there is no one willing and capable of running Twitter Inc. But if he is good to his word and walks away from the top leadership position at the social media company he bought two months ago, a number of people are already raising their hands.
Musk polled his following on Sunday night asking if he should step down, and the answer early Monday morning by about 58% of respondents was yes.
The mercurial entrepreneur has been almost single-handedly running Twitter since he bought the company in October, having fired or accepted resignations from almost all of the top-rank executives in the past months. Musk said early on that he didn’t plan to stay on permanently as chief executive officer and he has surrounded himself with a few trusted people, some of whom have suggested they’d be ready to take on what he calls a thankless task.
“No one wants the job who can actually keep Twitter alive. There is no successor,” Musk tweeted, adding “and it has been in the fast lane to bankruptcy since May.”
In the early days of Musk’s takeover of Twitter, he created a War Room, or fix-it committee, to revamp Twitter that included Jason Calacanis, an investor and podcaster, and former PayPal Holdings Inc. exec David Sacks. Another Musk loyalist who has been present since the early days is Andreessen Horowitz partner Sriram Krishnan, also a former Twitter executive.
Calacanis ran his own Twitter poll asking whether people thought he or Sacks should run Twitter, or a combination of both of them. Sacks garnered 31% of the vote, with 39% going to “other.” Calacanis didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. Musk didn’t respond to requests for comment on whether he was following through with honoring the outcome of the poll and who might replace him.
At the time Musk first moved in to Twitter’s headquarters on Market Street in San Francisco and began making wholesale changes to the company, people familiar with the situation said Sacks, Calacanis and Krishnan were given internal accounts, helped with identifying those deemed talented enough to stay on and were part of the initial pitch to advertisers in an effort to stem the flow of clients pulling ads. Calacanis and Sacks both have denied ever holding a formal role at the company.
Read more about Musk’s Twitter fix-it team
As CEO of Tesla Inc. and Space Exploration Technologies Corp., Musk could also tap talent at either of the other companies he helms. He’s been known to shuffle staff among his businesses before and brought in executives from Tesla to Twitter to help with the transition. Omead Afshar – previously the leader at Tesla’s Austin plant – was moved to SpaceX to work on Musk’s ambitious Starship deep-space rocket, Bloomberg has reported. And Tom Zhu, who joined Tesla in 2014 to help build its Supercharger network and most recently has been heading the carmaker’s Asia Pacific operations, is back in Austin, Bloomberg has reported, with some of his engineering team from China with him to assist in overseeing the ramp up of Giga Texas, a US hub for the Model Y and future production of the Cybertruck.
Others have been volunteering but have gained little traction. Lex Fridman, a respected AI academic and research scientist at MIT and a fan of Musk offered himself up, but was given a dour response.
Musk replied: “You must like pain a lot. One catch: you have to invest your life savings in Twitter and it has been in the fast lane to bankruptcy since May. Still want the job?”
The Financial Times suggested that Sheryl Sandberg could fit the bill. The longtime chief operating officer at Facebook was credited as the driving force behind the boom and advertising prowess at the company, which has since been renamed Meta Platforms Inc. If Sandberg doesn’t want the job, the FT suggested Sarah Friar, who was formerly chief financial officer of payments company Square Inc.
Musk has previously said he wants a ‘technologist,’ someone with talents across software and servers to take on the role, given those areas are at the core of Twitter’s business.
In an exchange with Former T-Mobile US Inc. CEO John Legere about a month ago, Musk rejected Legere’s voluntary outreach with a terse “no.”
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