The wait is over.
After months of procrastination, Elon Musk has finally announced that he has found the new boss of Twitter. The billionaire, who bought the platform on October 27 for $44 billion, said Thursday, May 11 that a woman will replace him as CEO in the coming weeks.
"Excited to announce that I’ve a new CEO for X/Twitter," the tech tycoon wrote on the social network, without providing the name.
The serial entrepreneur added that: "She will be starting in ~6 weeks!"
This means that Musk will handle the CEO role at around the third week of June.
The serial entrepreneur said he will then "transition to being exec chair & CTO [Chief Technology Officer], overseeing product, software & sysops."
The news should please Tesla shareholders, who were worried that the tycoon was spending a lot of time on Twitter at the expense of the electric vehicle manufacturer. Musk is trying to revamp the platform, which has suffered since his arrival from an exodus of advertisers due to its laissez-faire approach to handling hateful, racist, anti-Semitic content and also to spreading fake news and misinformation.
By focusing on Twitter, Musk was spending less time at Tesla (TSLA), frustrating some shareholders and markets that see the platform as an unwelcome distraction. Faced with criticism, Musk announced on December 20 that he would step down as CEO of Twitter after organizing a poll in which he asked users of the platform to vote whether or not he should continue to lead the company.
Nearly 18 million users voted and 'yes' won with 57.5% of the votes cast. Musk promised to abide by the result.
"I will resign as CEO as soon as I find someone foolish enough to take the job!" the billionaire said on Dec.20. "After that, I will just run the software & servers teams."
