Elon Musk says he’s found a woman to lead Twitter as new CEO – Twin Cities

By BARBARA ORTUTAY and MATT O’BRIEN (AP Technology Writers)

Elon Musk said Thursday he’s found a new CEO for Twitter, or X Corp. as it’s now known — and it’s a woman. He didn’t give her name, but said she’ll start in about six weeks.

Musk, who bought Twitter last fall and has since run it, has long insisted he isn’t the company’s permanent CEO. The Tesla billionaire said in a tweet on Thursday that his role would be changing to become Twitter’s CEO 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 didn’t want to be CEO of a company.

During his testimony, Musk said, “I expect to cut back on my time on Twitter and, over time, find someone else to run 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 commitment came after millions of Twitter users polled him on Twitter to step down called for, which the billionaire himself had created and promised to stick to.

In February, he told a conference that he expects to find a CEO for San Francisco-based Twitter “probably by the end of this year.”

Shares of Tesla rose about 2% on Thursday after Musk made the announcement. The electric carmaker’s shareholders have been concerned about how much of its attention is wasted on Twitter.

Last November, he was questioned in court about how he divides his time between Tesla and his other companies, including SpaceX and Twitter. Musk was required to testify in the Delaware federal chancellery after a shareholder challenged his potential $55 billion compensation plan as CEO of the electric-car maker.

Musk said he never intended to be CEO of Tesla, and he doesn’t want to be CEO of any other company, preferring to see himself as an engineer. Musk also said at the time that he expected an organizational reorganization of Twitter to be completed in about the next week. It’s been almost six months since he said that.

Musk’s tenure at the helm of Twitter has been chaotic, and he’s made various promises and announcements that he’s backed out of or never kept. It began on day one by firing the company’s top executives, followed by about 80% of the workforce. He has overhauled the platform’s verification system, scaling back content moderation and safeguards against the spread of misinformation.

Musk, in a banter with Twitter followers late last year, expressed pessimism about the prospects for a new CEO, saying that person “must be very fond of pain” to run a company that was “on the fast track to bankruptcy.”

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