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This article comes from the WeChat public account: Alphabet List, author: Bi Andi, editor: Zhao Jinjie, title picture from: Visual China

At the end of last month, on June 28, Elon Musk celebrated his 53rd birthday. He is one of the richest people in the world and has repeatedly topped the Forbes Global Rich List. He owns six companies, covering electric vehicles, space exploration, brain-computer interfaces, social media, artificial intelligence, etc. Before June 2023, he will be the CEO of these six companies at the same time.

The world is asking: Does he have a succession plan? If he retires or something else happens, who will manage these six companies?

Especially for the electric car company Tesla, Musk has been not only the CEO of the company but also its spokesperson for many years, and the brand value is firmly tied to the individual. Tesla's shareholders have repeatedly pressed questions about the succession plan, and some have even repeatedly "advised" Musk to step down as CEO. In their words, they almost sarcastically called Musk Tesla's "part-time CEO."

In June 2023, a ray of hope appeared - Musk stepped down, and the social media company Twitter welcomed a new CEO, Linda Yaccarino. At that time, the two reached a consensus that Yaccarino would be responsible for daily operations and sales, while Musk would be responsible for technology and supervise the work of engineers.

It was an unusual move for Musk, who for years had held on to the CEO positions of several companies like meat in the paw of a lion.

Since Musk took over, hate speech on Twitter has surged and advertisers have fled in large numbers. Musk stepped down from the position of Twitter CEO and let former NBC Universal advertising sales director Yaccarino take over. At the time, it seemed that he had finally listened to advice, but "listening to advice" itself did not happen often to him.

More importantly, if everything goes well, it means that other companies under Musk's name are also expected to eventually usher in management changes and embark on a path of sustainable corporate governance. As a company that Musk recently acquired, Twitter seems to be the best choice to test this path.

However, it has been a year since Iaccarino took over as CEO of Twitter, and the changes do not seem to be as big as imagined.

On stage, Musk still clearly influences the company's reputation, and sometimes he announces some of the company's vision or plans, which clearly go beyond the scope of "supervising technology." Even the company's name was changed from Twitter to X, which was posted by Musk first and then retweeted by Yaccarino.

The New York Times recently published a report titled "How to Solve a "Musk Problem"?" Through interviews with more than a dozen industry executives, X employees, Yaccarino's former colleagues and friends, Yaccarino's year of struggle behind the scenes also surfaced. In short: she was either putting out fires or on the way to putting out fires. She tried to boost X's advertising business, but Musk, who "supervised technology," kept undermining her efforts.

Power is great. But in the face of greater power, this power is better than nothing.

It's time for Tesla shareholders to understand one thing:The "Musk problem" cannot be solved by the nominal successor.

one

From the beginning, Yaccarino was "putting out fires."

In the early days, Yaccarino dealt with a lot of mess. Due to Musk's unconventional cost-cutting methods, Twitter had many unpaid rent, utility bills and software service bills, including hundreds of millions of service fees from the two major cloud service providers AWS and Google Cloud.

Once on the job, Iaccarino negotiated a cheaper contract with Google Cloud and resumed payments for a database and software that helps detect and remove child sexual exploitation content. She also resolved a heating bill at one of the company’s international offices, after employees had previously worn coats indoors and tried to heat the office with a kitchen oven.

The outside world sees Twitter's arrival of Yaccarino as good news, calling her "the adult in the room." Of course, this refers to Musk as the child who is out of control and needs someone to balance him. By the way, when Yaccarino joins Twitter in 2023, she will just be 60 years old, several years older than Musk.

Most importantly, Yaccarino met with several advertisers and researchers to tell them about her plans to protect brands from bad content, such as using technical tools to ensure that advertisers' content does not appear next to specific "harmful" keywords. Under her leadership, Twitter also began planning to share advertising revenue with creators on the platform.

But the "adults in the room" seemed unable to suppress the screaming "child".

Here are two things to tell you about how Yaccarino spent this year.

The first thing is that in July 2023, Twitter was renamed X, when Iaccarino had just taken office as Twitter CEO for a month.

A person familiar with the matter told the New York Times that although Musk had publicly stated that he wanted to turn the company into an all-purpose application X, when the official news of the name change was announced, Musk did not communicate with Yaccarino. Like many others, she learned about this information from Musk's posts on X. This was not a small decision. Even Yaccarino himself later said that the name change to X meant the establishment of a brand new company.

Yaccarino should have expected this day. Last May, Musk first tweeted that Yaccarino was the candidate for the company's CEO. This public announcement was also made without informing Yaccarino. At that time, Yaccarino had not yet told her colleagues at NBC Universal about her new job. As soon as Musk tweeted, her phone was flooded with various inquiries, and she had to rush home from the company.

The second thing was Musk’s scolding of advertisers.

Last November, as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict escalated, a large amount of violent content and hate speech appeared on X, which dissatisfied advertisers. Yaccarino had to hold meetings with employees every day to discuss countermeasures, and contact advertisers to appease them. For example, Anna Wintour, editor-in-chief of Vogue, which spends tens of millions of dollars on advertising with X every year, told Yaccarino that she had a good relationship with the head of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and asked X not to conflict with ADL again. At that time, ADL was pressuring Musk to delete anti-Semitic content from the platform. Yaccarino communicated directly with the head of ADL, promised to crack down on hate speech, and appeased Wintour with the same promise.

Thanks to her efforts, Vogue's company continued to advertise in X, and ADL gradually resumed its spending.

Musk, on the other hand, retweeted a conspiracy theory about Jews on X, saying that minorities are replacing white Europeans, and expressed his approval. Perhaps the "adults in the room" played a role, and he later admitted that this move was a mistake.

On November 18, Yaccarino said on X that the company will continue to protect the voice of users and call on advertisers to return. This is the direction that Yaccarino has been working towards.

However, just two weeks later, Musk attended the New York Times 2023 DealBook Summit, swearing and scolding advertisers on stage.

"If someone wants to blackmail me with advertising? Blackmail me with money? Go f**k yourself."

He suddenly made such remarks on the stage, and the host was stunned, but Musk repeated the swear word twice and then fired back: "The whole world will know that it was those advertisers who killed X, and we will record it in detail."

No one caught Yaccarino's expression at the time as she was sitting in the audience.

two

Musk's decision to step down as CEO and find Iaccarino to take over is not a problem in itself.

Iaccarino already had a strong reputation and connections in the advertising world. She was a 30-year veteran of Comcast's NBC Universal and Turner Network (TNT, now part of Warner Bros.). Before joining Twitter, she was the head of global advertising and partnerships at NBC Universal, managing more than $13 billion in advertising revenue annually.

NBC Universal even called her "redefined the advertising business in the 21st century." She has a wide network of contacts, and on social media such as Instagram, Yaccarino often posts photos with celebrities from all walks of life. She is an almost perfect candidate for Twitter, where advertising business is the mainstay but advertisers continue to lose.

But fast forward to this year, and the situation is not optimistic.

Last month, X executives told employees that 65% of advertisers have reopened their campaigns on X, but spending appears to be less than before. Internal documents obtained by The New York Times show that in the second quarter of this year, X's revenue in the United States was $114 million, down 25% from the first quarter. X's goal is to reach $190 million in revenue in the United States in the third quarter of this year, taking advantage of major events such as the US election and the Olympics, but even so, this figure is still 25% lower than the same period last year. In comparison, according to Twitter's financial report, its revenue in the second quarter of 2021 was $1.19 billion, of which the United States contributed $653 million.

This is also why Iaccarino can only be an "almost perfect" candidate, not a "perfect" candidate. She is really capable in the advertising business, but she has not been able to "be an adult" in Musk's room.

Most of the time, Yaccarino defended Musk, and she always showed her understanding and support for Musk to the outside world. Perhaps this was the basis for the two to continue their cooperation.

Some friends who know Musk well have offered advice to Yaccarino on how to interact with the headstrong billionaire.

Many people around Yaccarino did not support her taking on the job of Twitter CEO, and the opposition was even stronger when Twitter/X encountered problems later. Some friends and colleagues begged her to resign.

Because of her workaholic style and strong personality, it is not difficult for people around her to understand her support: "You must know one thing about Linda: resigning is equal to failure, and Linda cannot allow herself to fail."

But understanding does not mean support, the friend said: "She is using her good reputation to become Elon's chief apology officer."

Amid all the opposition, it was an on-stage confrontation that made Yaccarino lose his composure.

On September 28, 2023, Yaccarino attended CODE, an annual technology and digital media summit in California, USA. What caught her off guard was that Yoel Roth was also there. Roth is the former head of trust and safety at Twitter. He chose to leave after Musk acquired Twitter for $44 billion and published a sharp editorial criticizing Musk's massive layoffs and disregard for the safety of platform speech.

On the CODE stage, Ross was asked for advice for Yaccarino and Musk, and he shouted to Yaccarino, "Look at what your boss did to me."

Ross was referring to the fact that Musk had publicly expressed his support for him when he was in office, but his attitude changed drastically after he left. Musk once agreed to a tweet accusing Ross of sympathizing with pedophiles. As a result, Ross himself was subjected to a sudden escalation of online attacks and real threats, and even had to leave his home at one point.

Ross advised her: "If not for yourself, then for your family, your friends, the people who love you, you should be worried. I wish I had been more careful."

That afternoon, Yaccarino was interviewed at the event and rarely lost her composure, stumbling over the company's basic data. According to the New York Times, Yaccarino was very unhappy with Ross's appearance that day, and confronted the host after the interview, and finally left the backstage angrily. Subsequently, she canceled her plan to make a public appearance at the event hosted by the Wall Street Journal.

three

In December 2022, Tesla's stock price plummeted, and investors questioned whether Musk was too focused on the newly acquired social media company and did not have enough energy and time to take care of Tesla's affairs. Musk first revealed his idea of ​​finding a new CEO for Twitter at that time, saying that he wanted to find a CEO who was "stupid enough to take the job" to replace himself.

"Dumb enough to take this job" seemed like a joke at the time, Musk complaining about the mess at Twitter, but now it seems like an ominous warning in light of Iaccarino's experience.

If there were investors who had worried that Musk would not be able to focus on Tesla's business as a "part-time CEO," everything that happened at X was enough to disappoint them: the past year behind the scenes meant that Musk was still deeply involved in Twitter's affairs, and if he was distracted in the past, he would not be much less distracted now; secondly, it meant that this "experiment" could hardly serve as a "model" for Musk to hand over other companies to his successors.

Bill Gates resigned as CEO of Microsoft in 2000 at the age of 44. In 2019, Google's two 46-year-old founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, officially resigned as CEO and president of Google's parent company Alphabet, and were replaced by Sundar Pichai. Musk's nemesis, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, also resigned as the company's CEO in 2021 and became executive chairman.

Not only is it difficult to see Musk giving up the CEO position of other companies in the short term, the outside world has not even seen a decent succession plan.

Since Musk owns so many companies and covers a wide range of fields, it is more likely that there will be multiple "successors" who will take over different companies.

Speculations come out from time to time. For example, at SpaceX, President and Chief Operating Officer (COO) Gwynne Shotwell is a key figure in Musk's team. She joined SpaceX since its founding in 2002, has grown with the company, and has done what Iaccarino has not yet been able to do, playing the role of mediator between the boss, employees, customers and the public. In May of this year, Business Insider studied SpaceX's organizational structure and believed that Shotwell is now the actual person in charge of the company.

Another example is Tesla, where rumors of successors point to multiple different people. In 2022, a document Tesla submitted to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission showed that there were four people at Tesla's highest power center, one of whom was Zhu Xiaotong, senior vice president of the automotive business. For a time, the outside world speculated that Zhu Xiaotong would be Musk's successor, and even called him "Tesla's Cook."

But so far, these news have remained speculation. Musk's further news about the successor is a promise:There will be a successor.In May last year, Musk publicly stated that he had identified a successor to Tesla's board of directors, who would take over the company if something happened to him.

In the long-running "succession rumors", some so-called "successor candidates" have already left Musk's team. Last August, Tesla's Chief Financial Officer (CFO) Zachary Kirkhorn resigned. He had worked at Tesla for 13 years and was considered the strongest contender to succeed Musk as Tesla's CEO. This personnel change was quite unexpected to the outside world.

Ms. Yaccarino's struggle also raises a new question.It’s not about who will be Musk’s successor, but who is willing to be the next “stupid” person.

This article comes from WeChat public account: Alphabet List, author: Bi Andi, editor: Zhao Jinjie

This content is the author's independent opinion and does not represent the position of Huxiu. Reprinting is prohibited without permission. For authorization matters, please contact [email protected]