Elon Musk announces woman will take over as CEO of Twitter
Billionaire Elon Musk said Thursday that the new CEO of Twitter - an unnamed woman - will take over in about six weeks.
Musk, who bought Twitter last autumn has long insisted he is not the company’s permanent CEO. The Tesla boss tweeted he will transition to become the social media platform's executive chairman and chief technology officer.
In mid-November, just a few weeks after buying Twitter for € 40.24 billion, he told a Delaware court that he did 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,” Musk said while testifying.
More than a month later, he tweeted in December: “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 the billionaire himself created 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”.
Twitter's advertising business has taken a hit under Musk's mercurial rule, however, he told the UK's public broadcaster, the BBC, last month that the company was now “roughly” breaking even.
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“A new CEO is the only way forward for Twitter," said Insider Intelligence analyst Jasmine Enberg.
"The single biggest problem with Twitter’s ad business was Elon Musk. As he steps back, Twitter can begin to unravel Musk’s personal brand from the company’s corporate image and attempt to regain trust among advertisers. The success of those efforts will depend on who takes over, but it’s difficult to imagine that the new CEO could be more controversial or damaging to Twitter’s ad business than Musk has been.”
Shares of Tesla rose about two per cent Thursday after Musk made the announcement. Shareholders of the electric car company have been concerned about how much of his attention is being spent on Twitter.
Last November, he was questioned in court about how he splits his time between 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 € 50.32 billion compensation plan as CEO of the electric car company.
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's upended the platform's verification system and has scaled back content moderation and safeguards against the spread of misinformation.