Elon Musk says he has found a new CEO for Twitter

Musk says he never intended to be CEO of Tesla, and that he didn’t want to be chief executive of any other companies. Photo / Herald montage, AP, Getty Images

Elon Musk said today he has 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 will be starting in about six weeks.

Musk, who bought Twitter last year and has been running it since, has long insisted he is not the company’s permanent CEO. The Tesla billionaire said in a tweet today that his role will transition to being Twitter’s executive chairman and chief technology officer.

In mid-November, just a few weeks after buying the social media platform for US$44 billion, he told a Delaware court that he does not want to be the CEO of any company.

While testifying, Musk said: “I expect to reduce my time at Twitter and find somebody else to run Twitter over time.”

Excited to announce that I’ve hired a new CEO for X/Twitter. She will be starting in ~6 weeks!

My role will transition to being exec chair & CTO, overseeing product, software & sysops.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 11, 2023

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”.

Shares of Tesla rose about 2 per cent today 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 US$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 chief executive of any other companies either, preferring to see himself as an engineer. Musk also said at the time that he expected an organisational restructuring of Twitter to be completed in the next week or so. It’s been nearly six months since he said that.

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.

Bantering with Twitter followers late last year, Musk expressed pessimism about the prospects for a new CEO, saying that person “must like pain a lot” to run a company that “has been in the fast lane to bankruptcy”.

“No one wants the job who can actually keep Twitter alive. There is no successor,” Musk tweeted at the time.