A New Twitter CEO Won’t Change Who Calls the Shots

tech.hindustantimes.com:

Elon Musk appears to have finally found, to use his phrase, someone “foolish enough to take the job” as Twitter chief executive officer. It ends a months-long search and could begin a turnaround at the social network we love to hate.

If reports prove correct, that someone is Linda Yaccarino, NBCUniversal's head of advertising. She is yet to comment, but Comcast Corp., NBCU's parent, announced her departure on Friday. Yaccarino would bring the expertise and experience needed to tempt vanishing ad spend back to the platform, potentially reversing a trajectory that some analysts believe has Twitter in a death spiral.

In about six weeks, Musk will move to executive chairman and chief technology officer, “overseeing product, software and sysops,” he wrote on Twitter. The arrangement was apparently sufficient to reassure Tesla Inc. investors, with the carmaker's stock jumping after-hours on account of optimism that the great Twitter distraction — the “lingering albatross,” as one analyst described it — was finally reaching its end.

I don't buy it. These moves will do little to change who calls the shots at Twitter. It would palm off parts of the job that Musk either can't be bothered with or knows he is no good at, which, I suppose, would be some form of progress. But Yaccarino, if she takes the job, may soon come to realize the only thing more stressful than working under Musk is working over him.

We've seen other CEOs at tech companies become executive chair, stepping into the background to launch rockets or create curious flying cars but allowing their successors to work mostly autonomously. This separation is best achieved by moving away from day-to-day operations and being on hand only for the most consequential decisions —