Is Twitter’s New CEO Heading for the Glass Cliff?

“Her qualifications are impeccable and she has been very successful so far. said Joe Ellen Posner, who studies

“I’m not disrespecting her or disrespecting her at all, but I think this is basically an impossible situation for anyone.”

Her success will depend on how much Musk is willing to step back from Twitter’s day-to-day business. The CEOs of Tesla and SpaceX said they will continue to serve as executive chairman and chief technology officer of Yaccarino’s boss, Twitter, and report directly to her. He added that Yaccarino will “mainly focus on business operations.”

From the moment Yaccarino’s name was confirmed, ad industry pundits praised the decision as a good one, perhaps the only one, to steer Twitter in a more stable and profitable direction.

Yaccarino oversaw NBCUniversal’s market strategy and advertising revenues for broadcast, cable and digital assets totaling nearly US$10 billion. By comparison, Twitter’s final quarterly revenue as a public company reported in July was just US$1.17 billion.

Insider Intelligence analyst Jasmine Enberg, who follows Twitter, said, “She’s just starting to rebuild advertiser trust, bring back big advertisers, and really start improving Twitter’s advertising business. He’s the person you need,” he said. “That said, there is still a lot of work to do and Jacarino will have his hands full from day one.”

Musk’s time at Twitter was chaotic at best. From day one, he laid off the company’s top executives, followed by about 80% of its workforce.

This means that Twitter will have far fewer engineers to ensure the site runs smoothly, and far fewer content moderators to help keep hate speech, animal cruelty and graphic violence out.

He overturned the platform’s verification system and scaled back safeguards against the spread of misinformation. Analysts say some of these changes, combined with Musk’s own tendency to spread misinformation and associate with prominent conspiracy theorists and far-right figures, have plagued many of the platform’s advertisers. I am analyzing.

“For months, Elon Musk has repeatedly said that Twitter’s problem is the result of advertisers pulling out. But that’s not the cause of his problem. It’s a sign of trouble.He created chaos.He eliminated internal controls.””He eliminated important features such as content moderation.It made the user experience very unpredictable.Dangerous. We have allowed unpopular voices to flourish,” Pozner said.

“Given this situation, no one, male, female, or foreigner, will be able to correct this ship.”

The Glass Cliff theory applies as much to politics as it does to business, and, according to a 2011 Harvard Business Review report, “does not appear to apply to organizations with a history of female leadership.”

Twitter, like many tech companies, has no history of female leadership. All five founders were men, and all five CEOs, including Musk, were men.

Female CEOs are rare in any industry, but very rare in tech. A recent survey of S&P 500 companies found that 18 of the 340 CEOs are women, up from 16 in 2020. In the tech industry, notable female CEOs include Oracle’s Safra Catz and chipmaker AMD’s Lisa Su.

Yaccarino seems poised to take on Musk, but it’s unclear how that will turn out. In a recent onstage interview with Musk, she asked him if he could promise not to tweet after 3am. She agreed that she “got into trouble a few times” with her late night and early morning tweets, and she “wanted to tweet less at 3 a.m.,” she said. replied clearly.

She also said whether advertisers are willing to “influence” Twitter’s vision in “product development, ad safety and content management” so that advertisers are more interested in investing in the platform. I asked Mr. Musk, please.

Mr. Musk quickly silenced her.

“It’s totally cool to say you want your ads to appear in certain places on Twitter and not others, but it’s not cool to try to say what Twitter does,” he said. . “And if that means losing advertising dollars, we lose it. But free speech is paramount.”

Regaining advertiser trust will require Twitter to stabilize and make critical product decisions thoughtful rather than haphazard, as Mr. Musk is famously known to be inspired by fan tweets and niggles. It needs to be done deeply and carefully. Industry insiders say Yaccarino is highly capable with a proven track record and an impressive resume.

But for her to succeed commercially, she will need Musk’s buy-in on the product side.

“Whether he hands over the reins entirely to Yaccarino is highly debatable,” Enberg said. “And much of Twitter’s future success will depend on what he decides to do about it.”