Elon Musk to Step Down as Twitter CEO

Tero Vesalainen / shutterstock.com
Tero Vesalainen / shutterstock.com

If we know anything about Tesla, SpaceX, and Twitter head Elon Musk, it’s that he likes to keep everyone on their toes. So, it should be no surprise that after officially taking over one of the biggest social media platforms in the world, he’s now announcing that he’ll no be running it.

That’s right; Musk is stepping down as Twitter’s CEO.

The announcement came Thursday from Musk himself. He wrote on his Twitter account that he has found a replacement for himself as head of the platform and, give or take six weeks or so, will officially be relegated to lesser roles within the company.

“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 and CTO, overseeing product, software & sysops,” he wrote.

If you didn’t pick up on the “X” included in the message, it means this mystery someone will also be taking over SpaceX, as well as Twitter.

But just who this person is is being kept under wraps for the moment. As the tweet suggests, the only things we know are that she is a she and that she will begin her new position at the companies in about six weeks or so.

We can also presume that she’s what Musk himself would call “foolish.”

If you remember, back in December, Musk, who had just acquired the social media titan as his own, put out a poll on Twitter asking if he should or shouldn’t step down as the company’s CEO. He also promised that he would do whatever the poll results suggested.

By the end of the poll’s running, it was clear that more people than not, given the heavy liberal standing of Twitter, wanted Musk gone. The poll resulted in 57.5 percent of voters saying Musk should step down, compared to 42.5 percent who wanted him to keep that post.

And so he vowed that he would resign as CEO as soon as possible, given that he could find “someone foolish enough to take” his spot as its head.

It would seem that he has indeed found that someone, true to his word, is stepping down. Also, as promised, he will be moving to “run the software & server teams,” as he said in December.

Of course, it’s hard to know exactly what this will mean for the company just yet. So far, all we know is that Musk will be taking a more micromanagement role, leaving the macro or big picture stuff to someone else. Naturally, during the next weeks or so, while the new CEO is supposedly training and getting to know the companies, I presume Musk will be informing her on just what those big pictures look like, at least to him.

Presumably, the idea will be to keep Twitter and SpaceX on the same path of transparency and accountability that Musk has helped to create over the past several months. After all, that is one of the main reasons why the eccentric billionaire decided to take over the company in the first place, decrying its lack of answers to the public, as well as no small level of what many were calling censorship of just one political side over the other.

Since his take over, he’s completely rewritten a great many features of the company, including its community notes and making its metric number more transparent and available to the public. And so far, all those moves have made the company even more likable. Most people have had a more positive outlook on the platform.

This means that anyone Musk is now working to install as his replacement will have to have roughly the same ideas on transparency and accountability as he does. Perhaps she’ll just do it in a less eye-popping way than Musk.