Elon Musk said on Thursday he had found a new CEO for X Corp, the name of the company that owns the social networking site Twitter. Musk said the company will be led by a woman in about six weeks. The name of the new CEO is not yet known.
Musk, who bought Twitter last fall and has been running the social network ever since, has long said he won’t be the company’s full-time CEO. The billionaire tweeted on Thursday that he would become the company’s executive chairman and chief technology officer.
In mid-November, just weeks after buying the platform for $44 billion, he told a Delaware court he didn’t want to be the CEO of any company.
During his testimony, Musk said, “I’m looking forward to reducing my time on Twitter and eventually finding someone else to manage Twitter.”
More than a month later, he tweeted in December, “I will step down as CEO as soon as I find someone stupid enough to take the job.” The pledge came after millions of Twitter users called on him to step down in a poll the billionaire himself created and pledged to honor.
In February, Musk said on a conference call that he expected to find a CEO for the San Francisco-based company “probably by the end of this year.”
Tesla shares rose about 2% on Thursday after Musk announced the appointment of a new Twitter CEO. Shareholders of the electric car company were concerned about the attention the billionaire is giving to the social network.
Last November, Musk was questioned in court about how he divided his time between Tesla and his other companies, including SpaceX and Twitter.
Musk said he never intended to be the CEO of Tesla and didn’t want to be the chief executive of another company, preferring to think of himself as a technical leader. Musk also said at the time that he expected Twitter’s organizational restructuring to be completed “within the next week.” It’s been almost six months since he said that.
Musk’s tenure at the helm of Twitter has been chaotic, making various promises and statements that he later retracted or never kept. He started his first day by firing the company’s top executives, then laid off about 80% of all employees. It has disrupted filtering systems and reduced content moderation and misinformation protection measures.
Poking fun at Twitter followers late last year, Musk expressed pessimism about the prospects of a new CEO, saying the man “must love pain a lot” to lead a company that is “on the edge.” way to bankruptcy.
“Nobody wants a job that can really keep Twitter alive. There is no successor,” the billionaire confessed.
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