Elon Musk announces successor as Twitter chief – and that it’s now called X Corp
Elon Musk said that he has found a new CEO for Twitter, or X Corp, as it is now called.
He did not initially name the person but said she will be starting in about six weeks when the announcement was made on Thursday.
On Friday he took to the site to say the new CEO is Linda Yaccarino, who will focus on the business, while he looks at product design and the technological side of the social media giant.
Mr Musk, who bought Twitter last fall and has been running it since, has been insisting he is not the company’s permanent CEO.
The Tesla billionaire said in a tweet on Thursday that his role will transition to being Twitter’s executive chairman and chief technology officer.
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 44 billion US dollars (£38.4 billion), 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.”
Press Association – Associated Press Reporters