1. Just Some Guy
Category of Candidate: Stock images from an Onion article about a CEO.
See that guy pictured above? That’s SpaceX board member Steve Jurvetson. He was formerly a partner at Draper Fisher Jurvetson, the kind of instantly forgettable name that venture capital firms love, until he left under a cloud of suspicion related to an investigation into sexual harassment.
I’m not saying that Jurvetson is the number 1 most likely choice for Twitter CEO, just that he’s the kind of guy that will probably be installed. He’s boring. This guy will have an MBA from Stanford, be in his mid-50s, have a bit of silver in his hair, and stand around 6′ 2″ tall. Most likely his first name will be one clean syllable. It might be Todd or Bill or Ray. Normally it would be fine but in this case, no Jacks are allowed.
Elon just needs some guy to manage things, keep his mouth shut, and reassure advertisers. This guy should not have opinions about anything and should not be too rich yet. He needs to be a little hungry for some ladder climbing.
It could also end up being a woman. Musk has hired women at the top level in the past. Gwynne Shotwell is president and COO of SpaceX and by most accounts, she actually runs the company. Musk himself testified under oath last month that he’s really “responsible for the engineering of the rockets” and downplayed his role on the business side of things. And earlier this month, Bill Nelson, the head of NASA, said that he’d spoken with Shotwell about whether Twitter was distracting Musk from what’s important. She reassured him everything was fine and Nelson said, “I hugged her with a smile on my face, because I know she is running that thing. She’s running SpaceX.”
Few people would know Shotwell’s name and fewer could pick her out of a lineup, but she seems to be doing a good job with SpaceX and that’s the kind of person Musk needs right now.
There’s no way that Musk could attract top talent to Twitter at this point, but his best bet is finding some faceless rando to come over and be an adult.
