That was surely most Red Hatters' dream, but Arvind Krishna as CEO is probably the best possible outcome for Red Hat among the realistic ones (not counting that Whitehurst will be President, while Ginny Rometty was President and CEO).

Arvind Krishna was "Jim Whitehurst's boss" until now (Red Hat is under the IBM cloud division), and back when the acquisition was announced in 2018 he visited one of the Red Hat offices for a sort of "town hall" meeting. He almost unanimously made a very good impression, and he won over quite a few employees that at the time were skeptical about the acquisition.

He'll become the IBM President.

He’ll be CEO in 3 years as long as the RH acq works. Otherwise he’ll be thrown under the bus.