Elon Musk officially confirmed his imminent departure as CEO of Twitter after taking over the popular social media platform last October.
"Excited to announce that I’ve hired a new CEO for X/Twitter. She will be starting in ~6 weeks!" the tech mogul tweeted on Thursday, May 11. "My role will transition to being exec chair & CTO [Chief Technology Officer], overseeing product, software & sysops."
This latest change comes around five months after Musk shared a poll asking Twitter users whether or not he should give the job of running Twitter to somebody else. 17.5 million votes — 57% of users polled — said that he should quit, and soon after, the Space X co-founder confirmed that he would honor the results.
"I will resign as CEO as soon as I find someone foolish enough to take the job!" he tweeted at the time. "After that, I will just run the software & servers teams."
Earlier this year, while attending the World Government Summit in Dubai, Musk reiterated his intention to find someone to take over as CEO of Twitter, speculating it may not happen until the end of 2023.
"I think I need to stabilize the organization and just make sure it’s in a financially healthy place and that the product roadmap is clearly laid out," he explained at the Summit. "I’m guessing probably towards the end of this year should be good timing to find someone else to run the company because I think it should be in a stable position around the end of this year."
As OK! previously reported, Musk has laid off thousands of Twitter employees since he acquired the platform for $44 billion last October. He discussed the controversial layoffs during an April interview with former Fox News personality Tucker Carlson.
"What percentage of your staff did you fire at Twitter? One of the great business stories of the year?" Carlson asked him, to which Musk replied, "I think we’re about 20 percent of the original size."
"If you’re not trying to run some sort of glorified activist organization ... and you don’t care that much about censorship, then you can really let go of a lot of people, it turns out," he continued.
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