Elon Musk said Thursday that he’s found a new CEO for Twitter, or X Corp, as it’s now called — and it’s a woman. He did not 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 he is not the company’s permanent CEO. The Tesla billionaire said in a tweet on Thursday that his role would transition to 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 look forward to reducing my time on Twitter and finding someone else to run Twitter over time.” to take the job. The pledge comes after millions of Twitter users asked him to step down in a Twitter poll created by the billionaire himself and promised to follow through.
In February, he told a conference that he anticipated finding a CEO for San Francisco-based Twitter “probably later this year.” Tesla shares rose nearly 2% on Thursday following Musk’s announcement. Shareholders of the electric car company are concerned about how much of their attention Twitter is consuming.
Last November, he was questioned in court about how he splits his time between Tesla and his other companies, including SpaceX and Twitter. Musk was scheduled to testify in a lawsuit in Delaware’s Chancery Court over a shareholder challenge to a potentially $55 billion compensation plan as CEO of the electric car company.
Musk stated that he never intended to become CEO of Tesla, and that he did not want to be CEO of another company, 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. It has been almost six months since he said this.
Musk’s tenure at the helm of Twitter has been chaotic, and he has made many promises and announcements that he has backtracked on or never followed through on. He began his first day by firing the company’s top executives, followed by about 80% of its employees. They have beefed up the platform’s verification system and reduced content moderation and safeguards against the spread of misinformation.
Joking with Twitter followers late last year, Musk expressed pessimism about the prospects for a new CEO, saying that person “must love pain a lot” to run a company that ” has been in the fast lane to bankruptcy.” The job that might actually keep Twitter alive. There is no successor,” Musk tweeted at the time.