'Found someone foolish enough to take the job’: Elon Musk steps down as Twitter CEO
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Elon Musk on Thursday revealed that he has found a new CEO for Twitter, or X Corp. as it’s now called. Without naming the person, he said that she will be starting in about six weeks.
Musk bought Twitter last fall for $44 billion and has been running it since. However, he has long insisted he is not the company’s permanent CEO.
The Tesla billionaire said in a tweet Thursday that his role will transition to being Twitter's executive chairman and chief technology officer.
Musk has been saying for nearly six months that he plans to find a new CEO for San Francisco-based Twitter.
He told a Delaware court in November last year, just a few weeks after buying the social media platform that he does not want to be the CEO of any company. “I expect to reduce my time at Twitter and find somebody else to run Twitter over time”, he said while testifying.
His announcement came after millions of Twitter users asked him to step down in a Twitter poll the billionaire himself created and promised to abide by. “I will resign as CEO as soon as I find someone foolish enough to take the job”, he tweeted in December.
In February, he told a conference he anticipated finding a CEO for Twitter “probably toward the end of this year.”
Shares of Tesla rose about 2% Thursday after Musk made the announcement.
Last November, he was questioned in court about how he splits his time among Tesla and his other companies, including SpaceX and Twitter. Musk had to testify in the trial in Delaware’s Court of Chancery over a shareholder’s challenge to his potentially $55 billion compensation plan as CEO of the electric car company.
With inputs from agencies
