Twitter CEO Elon Musk says he may resign by the end of 2023, a year after millions of Twitter users voted for him to resign, a poll he said he would honour.
Musk said in a video uploaded to YouTube, “I need to stabilise the organization and just make sure it’s in a financially healthy place and that the product roadmap is clearly laid out.” To find a new CEO, “I’m guessing probably towards the end of the year would be good timing.”
According to Musk, things should settle down by the year’s end. After the interview, he tweeted a joke photo of his dog Floki sitting at a desk with the caption, “The new CEO of Twitter is amazing,” though he gave no hints as to who might be in line to take the role. CNBC reported that a CEO search has been ongoing for a while now, but suitable candidates have proven elusive.
Though he polled Twitter users about his plans to resign as CEO, Musk has not provided a specific timeline for when he might do so. His only comment was that he would step down once he found “someone foolish enough to take the job.” Following his resignation as CEO, he plans to remain in charge of Twitter’s software and servers teams.
After purchasing Twitter in late October for $44 billion, Musk assumed the role of CEO. His time in office has been marked by frequent upheaval, including large-scale layoffs, the introduction of a new policy that was quickly reversed, and a “massive” decline in advertising revenue.
Recently, Musk has reportedly become obsessed with the number of people who view his tweets, to the point where he fired an engineer who tried to explain the decline in his tweets’ popularity.
Meanwhile, Musk’s electric car company, Tesla, has seen its share price drop from nearly $400 per share in April 2016 to just over $200 today.
Musk has a history of overstating his ability to predict the future, so it’s unlikely that he will actually resign as CEO by the end of the year as he has suggested.
The original production start date for the Tesla Cybertruck was late 2021, but the new date of 2024 is over two years later. Earlier in 2017, Musk predicted that Teslas would be capable of autonomous cross-country travel. More than five years have passed, and the goal has still not been met.
