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‘s stated plan to find someone to succeed him as Twitter Inc.’s chief executive officer has set the billionaire up with the thorny task of identifying a candidate for a job he has said isn’t desirable.
Running Twitter would be a tall order under any circumstances. It was a consistently money-losing business before Mr. Musk acquired it in October, and is now in the middle of broad tumult in its industry. Meanwhile, many advertisers, Twitter’s main source of revenue, have stopped spending since Mr. Musk’s arrival, and he has made a rash of changes, some of which he reversed.
Mr. Musk has a collection of Silicon Valley friends and allies who provided advice during the run-up to his acquisition or since he took over—though none have been publicly named as Twitter executives.
Joe Lonsdale, a tech investor, said in a tweet that he wasn’t interested in becoming Twitter CEO.
Photo:
Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg News
Among them have been the tech investor
Jason Calacanis,
the Andreessen Horowitz general partner and former Twitter product executive,
Sriram Krishnan,
and the investor and former technology executive
David Sacks.
They have said they sought to help shortly after the acquisition but described their involvement as limited and temporary during the initial transition period.
Messrs. Calacanis, Sacks and Krishnan didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Mr. Calacanis, an early investor in
Uber Technologies Inc.,
recently posted his own Twitter poll—with emojis suggesting it was in jest—asking whether he or Mr. Sacks or someone else should be Twitter’s next CEO. The “Other” category got the most votes. Mr. Calacanis later tweeted, again with the emojis: “Who would like the most miserable job in tech AND media?! Who is insane enough to run twitter?!?!”
Mr. Calacanis told Mr. Musk in April that being CEO of Twitter was his “dream job,” according to messages disclosed as part of a legal fight in Delaware over Mr. Musk’s takeover.
When someone tweeted suggesting that
Joe Lonsdale,
another technology investor, would be the Twitter CEO, Mr. Lonsdale responded: “Lol no thanks.” Mr. Lonsdale later declined to comment.
Mr. Musk’s poll spawned a range of purported volunteers, from a Massachusetts Institute of Technology research scientist to
Snoop Dogg.
The rapper conducted his own Twitter poll, asking, “Should I run Twitter?” It elicited 3,398,119 votes, with 81% saying yes.
“Can I be the new Twitter CEO?” tweeted the YouTube star known as Mr. Beast, who has previously tweeted that he wanted “to be Elon one day.” Mr. Musk replied Thursday, “It’s not out of the question.”
Whoever ends up as CEO will be both Mr. Musk’s employee—he owns the company—and, notionally, his supervisor, as he tweeted Tuesday that he plans to continue running “the software & servers teams.”
For all the public mystery surrounding who could take over the CEO role, the company has made some headway replenishing the ranks of managers lower down in the organization who help keep it running. They have included a collection of Twitter employees and veterans from elsewhere in Mr. Musk’s diverse business empire.
The following people are among those who have taken on more prominent roles in recent weeks after other Twitter executives were ousted or left, from advertising sales to product changes and content-moderation decisions.
Ella Irwin
was named Twitter’s head of trust and safety last month and has become a public voice seeking to explain Twitter’s content-moderation changes under Mr. Musk. While many content-moderation researchers have questioned and criticized such changes, Ms. Irwin said in a recent interview with The Wall Street Journal that Twitter was giving priority to safety.
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Chris Riedy,
the company’s new head of global advertising sales, started in Twitter’s San Francisco office and most recently was based in Dublin, where he led Twitter’s advertising business in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
Esther Crawford,
a Twitter product executive, has worked on Mr. Musk’s most significant product change so far—the revamped Twitter Blue subscription service, which relaunched earlier this month after several false starts. Ms. Crawford came to Twitter after co-founding a group video chat service, which was acquired by Twitter in 2020. After Mr. Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, she quickly emerged as a prominent employee working on his bid to bolster Twitter’s subscription revenue, and has regularly tweeted out updates informing users about the subscription service and other product changes.
Engineers from
Tesla Inc.,
where Mr. Musk is CEO, were brought in to work on reshaping Twitter, according to records viewed by the Journal and people familiar with the matter. Mr. Musk has said Tesla engineers were asked to evaluate the Twitter engineering team, but he said it was “just on a voluntary basis” and a “mostly short-term matter,” according to a transcript from a trial last month over his pay package at the electric-vehicle maker.
Sheen Austin,
a Tesla engineer, was named to oversee Twitter’s infrastructure division, whose engineers help keep the platform running, according to people familiar with the matter. Mr. Austin’s Twitter role was earlier reported by the Information. He didn’t respond to a request for comment.
—Meghan Bobrowsky and Heather Somerville contributed to this article.
Write to Alexa Corse at alexa.corse@wsj.com
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