Ask them to be the new face of the disaster, then replace them when they fail at the impossible, or if they manage to make some headway, find an excuse to replace them for not having done the nearly impossible fast enough and stick another stooge in to take credit.

Leave it to EM to play every page of the corporate D-Bag playbook.

I discovered today that the tactic is called [1]The Glass Cliff .

[1] https://psychology.exeter.ac.uk/cic/about/theglasscliff/

Let's see how far this plays out, will he really back off or will he just make this shit show shittier? Nah, couldn't happen...

New CEO : responsible for Advertising strategy, the lifeblood of twitter.

Old CEO : Will continue to make decisions for Deveelopment, Software and Ops

I don't see any conflict there at all. Should be Smoooooooth sailing.

The key contract clause will be the vesting period of the stock options.

The key Twitter date will be start date + vesting period +1 day

She'll find selling ads on Twitter a lot harder than selling ads on NBC was, when they invite white supremacists like Tucker Carlson to their platform who advertisers already found impossibly toxic at Fox News - and he'll be worse now because he'll know "free speech maximalist" Musk will let him say literally anything. If it was just him advertisers could say "make sure my ads aren't on his stream" but he's just the tip of the iceberg, and Tucker being there will probably encourage others like him to take their podcasts and what not to Twitter.

I'm sure Musk will blame the CEO when the company collapses, even though he's the one making all the bonehead decisions that drive advertisers away.

So you're either BAME or Woke, sickening.

You find BAME sickening? Odd thing to post publicly, I'm sure that will go well for you. If only we had a word for this sort of position...

You think white supremacy should be applauded, sickening.

I didn't know you could spell "scapegoat" with only 3 letters.

El Reg really needs to add some sort of "sitting back and grabbing the popcorn" icon.

Reading some of these comments, it sounds like the general opinion is that clever old Elon is leading this innocent little lamb to slaughter. Is that really likely?

I mean: one has to assume that she'll be making very good money -- it seems unlikely that a "hard-nosed negotiator" would be taking her entire salary in stock options. As for her future prospects... suppose Twitter goes down in flames, as seems likely. Nobody whose initials are not EM will blame her for the failure, and in her next job interview, it will be "Well, yeah, Twitter failed, but not because of me. It was... you know..." And if by some miracle Twitter survives and perhaps even morphs into X, she'll not only become very rich, but she'll be able to write her own ticket anywhere else that she chooses to go.

To me, it almost looks like a can't-lose scenario for her. She's not the desperate one here, and based on the (admittedly small amount of) information we have about her, it doesn't sound like she's a pushover. I don't think Twitter is likely to succeed long-term, but success or failure, as long as she acts with a bare minimum of integrity, I suspect she'll come out OK.

Yeah, I don't think she's innocent in this - she knows she's going to be his meat shield, but a) good money, b) good on the resume - once you've been CEO then no matter how badly you fail you can always get rehired as someone else's CEO, just look at Phil Harrison, c) everyone knows it was still Elmo's fault.

They both win from this (Elmo gets his meat shield).

I agree, and on the surface, she would be the perfect person to serve as the new CEO. Twitter's driven away a lot of advertisers and Musk got in fights with several of the remaining ones, and advertising is the way Twitter makes basically all of its money. The pay for unverified encryption and a check mark plan isn't going to make a dent. I think hiring someone with knowledge of the advertising industry and relationships with advertisers is likely going to extend Twitter's life by at least a couple months. If she had a lot of power, it would have the option of being longer, but Musk is the guy who has done all the stupid stuff for the past few months, so I see no reason to believe he's just going to stop. As such, although she has the opportunity, she should probably look at this as a speculative stepping stone, not a long-term deal.

I agree with the large majority of your reply, except for one point.

Twitter didn't drive away the clients, Politics did.....And this is the true lesson that must be remembered...

The current political situation is dangerous for all us, the division is steering people apart, politicians are jumping on the band wagon and pushing harder a situation which is already on tightrope....

I wish people would stop looking a the details and start looking at the bigger picture, ideologies have to start swinging back to the center... It's time the extremism, regardless of the side, starting re-pushing towards a softer vision, an actual acceptance of the other rather than the false ideologies actually being pushed.

Twitter is merely a Litmus test for things about to come.

As a non-user, I'm not sure that's the case. It's been popular to say that the reason advertisers have been leaving is just due to extremists forming a lot of the posts, and I'm sure that's a major factor. Another likely factor is that a lot of Twitter employees that interacted with advertisers, providing them support and someone to complain to, have been fired. That can't have helped either. Another reason is that advertisers were uncomfortable with the ease of impersonation enabled by the buy-your-verification system, back when users still saw the mark as indicative of something useful. Those latter two causes aren't political; they're the result of stupid management decisions and are specific to Twitter. I don't know which have been the largest factors making people change their advertising budgets, possibly because I tend to think that most advertising spending is wasted anyway.

And he promises, absolutely promises, that he'll never in any circumstances interfere in her job in any way or overrule any of her decisions even if he disagrees with them.............................. Sure.

If she attempts to disinfect the sewer at all, I hope she realises just what sort of awful reaction Elon's incel fanbois are going to have. And finds out in advance whether Musk is going to react by saying "Sorry, that's just free speech, can't do anything".

She's just going to be his meat shield. He'll still be calling all the shots - he uses Twitter obsessively, and won't be able to resist because he has zero self-control. Anything he says to the contrary is an obvious eye-rolling lie.

Well, they both benefit from it, but anyone who thinks she's going to significantly change things has just not been watching Elmo for the last 10 years.