Elon Musk did not name his pick but said she would be taking over from him as Twitter CEO in about six weeks.
Elon Musk said on Thursday he has found a new CEO for Twitter – but did not name the person, only saying “she” would be starting in about six weeks.
Musk, who bought the social media platform last October and has since been running it, has long insisted he is not its permanent CEO. The billionaire entrepreneur wrote on Twitter that his role would transition to being the company’s executive chairman and chief technology officer.
In a tweet, he said: “Excited to announce that I’ve hired a new CEO for X/Twitter. She will be starting in ~6 weeks!”
Shares of Tesla rose about 2 per cent after he made the announcement. Shareholders of his electric car company have been concerned about how much of his attention is being spent on Twitter.
Musk’s tenure at Twitter’s helm has been chaotic, and he’s made various promises and proclamations he’s backtracked or never followed up on.
He began his first day firing the company’s top executives, followed by roughly 80 per cent of its staff.
He has since upended the platform’s verification system and has scaled back content moderation and safeguards against the spread of misinformation.
‘No one wants the job’
Bantering with Twitter followers in December, Musk expressed pessimism about the prospects for a new CEO, saying that person “must like pain a lot” to run a company that “has been in the fast lane to bankruptcy”.
“No one wants the job who can actually keep Twitter alive. There is no successor,” Musk said at the time.
Two days later, he tweeted: “I will resign as CEO as soon as I find someone foolish enough to take the job”. The pledge came after millions of Twitter users asked him to step down in a Twitter poll he created himself and promised to abide by.
In February, he told a conference he anticipated finding a CEO for San Francisco-based Twitter “probably toward the end of this year”.
Last November, he was questioned in court about how he splits his time between Tesla and his other companies, including SpaceX and Twitter. Musk replied he never intended to be CEO of Tesla, and that he didn’t want to be chief executive of any other companies either, preferring to see himself as an engineer.