Elon Musk Wants Twitter to Have a New CEO by End of Year

Elon Musk believes that Twitter may be ready to get a new CEO by the end of 2023. Speaking at the World Government Summit today (via Bloomberg), the current Twitter CEO said that he expects to leave Twitter once he gets the company to a “stable” condition later this year.

“I need to stabilize the organization and just make sure it’s in a financially healthy place and the product road map is clearly laid out,” Musk said. “I’m guessing toward the end of this year should be a good timing to find someone else to run the company. I think it should be in stable condition around the end of this year.”

After taking over the company in late October, Musk laid off over half of Twitter’s workforce to cut costs. At the time, the new Twitter CEO said that the job cuts were necessary as Twitter was losing over $4 million a day.

One of Musk’s first big projects at Twitter was the launch of a new version of Twitter Blue, with the long-term objective to have Twitter make half of its revenue from subscriptions. This plan apparently isn’t going so well as Twitter reportedly had around 290,000 subscribers in January. This represents approximately $28 million in annual revenue, which is quite insignificant compared to the $4 million Twitter was losing every day last fall.

Elon Musk, who remains the CEO of Tesla and Space X, said back in December that he would resign as the CEO of Twitter as soon as he found “someone foolish enough to take the job.” Despite the drastic cuts to Twitter’s workforce, the platform continues to mostly operate as expected, if you don’t take into account Musk’s attempts to tweak the algorithm to give more exposure to his tweets.

Even though Elon Musk keeps repeating that Twitter usage has been increasing in recent months, Musk’s management style has been scaring off advertisers from the beginning. More recently, the company also alienated its developer community by banning all third-party Twitter clients.

All of this doesn’t sound like a great way to “stabilize the organization,” to quote Musk’s words. All in all, it remains to be seen if Twitter will really end up in a better state at the end of the year with Musk as its CEO. Anyway, a lot can certainly happen in the coming months.