Elon Musk says he has appointed woman to take over as Twitter CEO
Elon Musk revealed on Thursday that he has appointed a new chief executive for the social media platform – but did not disclose her identity.
Mr Musk, who bought Twitter last October and has been running it since, has repeatedly insisted that he has no intention to be the company’s permanent CEO.
His replacement, a woman, will be starting in six weeks, he tweeted on Thursday.
The Tesla billionaire said that his role will transition to acting as Twitter’s executive chairman and chief technology officer.
Tesla Inc shares jumped 2.4 per cent immediately after the announcement.
Mr Musk has been saying for nearly six months that he plans to find a new CEO for San Francisco-based Twitter.
In mid-November, just a few weeks after buying the social media platform for $44bn (£38.4bn), he told a Delaware court that he does not want to be the CEO of any company.
While testifying, Mr Musk said: “I expect to reduce my time at Twitter and find somebody else to run Twitter over time.”
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 Twitter “probably toward the end of this year.”
Since taking over the Twitter last year, Musk has been heavily involved in the management of the company, implementing a series of sweeping reforms.
The company, which once had more than 8,000 staff, has been scaled back to fewer than 2,000. Those that remain are expect to work 11 or 12 hours days just to keep the platform online.
One of Musk’s central changes has been to launch a subscription model where users are required to pay a £7 monthly fee to have a blue tick attached to their account.
Prior to the takeover, the verification badge was only given to notable or high-profile accounts that Twitter had analysed and deemed authentic.
Last month, blue ticks were removed from “legacy” users – who were verified prior to the takeover – leaving only subscribers to the Twitter Blue service with them.
Days later, some prominent users of the platform reported that their badges had returned for free, with a label falsely indicating that they were paid subscribers to the Twitter Blue service.
