Elon Musk To Step Down As Twitter CEO

SAN FRANCISCO — Elon Musk will step down as Twitter's CEO, he announced in a tweet, following a chaotic several months for the company punctuated by uncertainty and job losses.

"Excited to announce that I’ve hired a new CEO for X/Twitter," the mercurial billionaire tweeted Thursday.

While he did not identify his successor, Musk said she would start work in about six weeks. Musk will transition to serving as the company's executive chair and chief technology officer overseeing product, software and systems operations, he said.

Twitter has been besieged by layoffs since Musk acquired it last fall for $44 billion, going from 7,500 workers in October to about 1,800 as of late February, The New York Times reported.

Nearly 2,000 former employees have filed legal claims against Twitter in arbitration, according to Reuters, although lawsuits alleging sexism and discrimination based on disability have been dismissed.

"The 51-year-old barreled in with ideas about how the social media service should operate, but with no comprehensive plan to execute them," the Times reported in November.

"... Some top executives were summarily fired by email. One engineering manager, upon being told to cut hundreds of workers, vomited into a trash can. Others slept in the office as they worked grueling schedules to meet Mr. Musk’s orders."

Musk has long insisted he is not the company's permanent CEO. In mid-November, just a few weeks after buying the platform, he told a Delaware court that he did not want to be the CEO of any company.

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."

Shares of Tesla, which Musk also owns, rose about 2 percent Thursday after the announcement. Shareholders of the electric car company had been concerned about how much of his attention was being spent on Twitter.

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.

The Associated Press contributed to this story.