The Tesla billionaire said in a tweet on Thursday that his role will transition to that of Twitter’s executive chairman and chief technology officer.
SAN FRANCISCO — Elon Musk said Thursday that he has found a new CEO of Twitter, or X Corp. as it’s now called — and it’s a woman. He didn’t name her, but said she would start in about six weeks.
musk, who bought Twitter last fall and has run it ever since, has long insisted that he is not the company’s permanent CEO. The Tesla billionaire said in a tweet on Thursday that his role will transition to that of Twitter’s executive chairman and chief technology officer.
In mid-November, just weeks after buying the social media platform for $44 billion, he told a Delaware court that he did not want to be CEO of any company.
In testifying, Musk said, “I expect to reduce my time at Twitter and over time I will find someone else to run Twitter.”
More than a month later in December, he tweeted: “I will resign as CEO as soon as I find someone stupid enough to take the job.” The pledge came after millions of Twitter users asked him to resign in a Twitter poll that the billionaire himself created and promised to follow.
In February, he told a conference that he expected to find Twitter’s CEO in San Francisco “probably by the end of this year.”
Tesla shares rose about 2% on Thursday after Musk’s announcement. The electric car company’s shareholders were concerned about how much of his attention was being spent on Twitter.
Last November, he was questioned in court about how he divides his time between Tesla and his other companies, including SpaceX and Twitter. musk was scheduled to testify at a trial in the Delaware Court of Chancery over a shareholder challenge to his $55 billion compensation plan as CEO of the electric car company.
Musk said he never intended to be CEO of Tesla and that he didn’t want to be CEO of other companies either, preferring to see himself as an engineer. Musk also said at the time that he expected Twitter’s organizational restructuring to be completed in the next week or so. It’s been almost six months since he said that.
Musk’s term at the head of Twitter was chaotic, and he made various promises and statements that he reneged on or never kept. He began his first day by firing the company’s top management, and then about 80% of its staff. He overturned the platform verification system and reduced content moderation and safeguards against spreading misinformation.
Joking with followers on Twitter late last year, Musk expressed pessimism about the new CEO’s prospects, saying the man would “have to suffer a lot” to lead a company that was “on speed to bankruptcy.”
“No one wants a job that can actually support Twitter. There is no successor,” Musk tweeted.
https://www.10tv.com/article/news/nation-world/elon-musk-says-new-ceo-for-twitter-found/507-1c7d7916-70f2-4fbe-8e6b-01b15a7751c8
