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Elon Musk Steps Down as Twitter CEO

At 3:50PM EST, Thursday May 11th, Elon Musk announced he was stepping down as the CEO for Twitter. As a result, TSLA shares popped.

By Justin Nugent · May 11, 2023

UPDATE: The new CEO of Twitter is confirmed to be Linda Yaccarino, the former NBCUniversal executive.

I am excited to welcome Linda Yaccarino as the new CEO of Twitter!@LindaYacc will focus primarily on business operations, while I focus on product design & new technology.

Looking forward to working with Linda to transform this platform into X, the everything app. https://t.co/TiSJtTWuky
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 12, 2023

As soon as @LindaYacc is ready, we will do a Spaces where you can ask us anything
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 12, 2023

At 3:50PM EST, Thursday May 11th, Elon Musk announced he was stepping down as the CEO for Twitter.

Excited to announce that I’ve hired a new CEO for X/Twitter. She will be starting in ~6 weeks!

My role will transition to being exec chair & CTO, overseeing product, software & sysops.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 11, 2023

Elon Musk will remain on the board to oversee products, software, and system operations. This may be in relation to a poll held by Elon on December 18th, 2022, where he asked followers whether he should step down as the head of Twitter.

Should I step down as head of Twitter? I will abide by the results of this poll.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 18, 2022

After 17.5 million votes, the results were in — 57.5% voted yes.

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Elon Musk said he had hired a new CEO, but there is no news yet about exactly who that is — though from context, we know it’s a woman.

Though the news just broke moments before market close, Tesla stock had already begun to react.

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After a mostly sleepy day, shares ended +2.1% on the news, and have risen another 0.41% after hours.

Though Musk’s tenure at Twitter was rather short, his impact has been very large, including the introduction of additional identity verification methods, the new pay-for-blue-check system, Twitter stock going private, chances in the social media company’s free speech suppression policies, and an overhaul of the staff.

We’ll keep this piece up to date when more news arises.