Elon Musk Says He Will Resign as Twitter CEO When He Finds Successor

At his different corporations, which embrace the electrical automaker Tesla and the rocket maker SpaceX, Mr. Musk has generally appointed a key adviser to handle the enterprise in his absence. At SpaceX, the duty has fallen to Gwynne Shotwell, its president and chief working officer.

At Twitter, Mr. Musk had opted to run the corporate himself. He has borrowed staff from his different corporations, together with Tesla and the Boring Firm, a tunneling start-up, to hitch him. Steve Davis, the president of the Boring Firm, has led varied cost-cutting initiatives at Twitter. Mr. Musk has had folks rotate out and in to advise him on authorized and monetary issues, together with the investor Antonio Gracias, a former Tesla board member, and Alex Spiro, his private lawyer.

Mr. Musk has additionally relied on Tesla and SpaceX staff to take care of technical issues, as layoffs and resignations have decimated Twitter’s engineering ranks. Whereas no less than one Tesla board member stated he believed the carmaker’s staff can be solely briefly deployed at Twitter, Mr. Musk has continued to make use of them, together with Sheen Austin, a Tesla engineer who has been heading up Twitter’s infrastructure group.

A few of Mr. Musk’s advisers have lobbied to guide Twitter. On Sunday, Jason Calacanis, an investor in Mr. Musk’s Twitter, asked his own followers on the platform if he or the enterprise capitalist David Sacks needs to be Twitter’s chief government, or share the place.

Mr. Musk, who was in Qatar for the World Cup last this weekend with Jared Kushner, can be searching for new funding in Twitter. After he bought $3.6 billion of Tesla shares final week, his finance crew, led by Jared Birchall, the top of his household workplace, despatched emails to potential buyers, stated one one who was approached to take a position and who was not licensed to talk publicly.

The emails to potential backers invited them to take a position on the $54.20 share worth that Mr. Musk paid to purchase the corporate, the particular person stated. However Mr. Musk has since publicly stated the worth he paid for Twitter was greater than twice what it was price. The potential fund-raising was reported earlier by Semafor.

Mr. Musk has continued to aggressively slash prices at Twitter. On Friday night time, the corporate started one other spherical of layoffs, in line with 4 folks with information of the actions and paperwork seen by The New York Occasions. About 50 staff, primarily from the corporate’s infrastructure division, had been reduce, the folks stated. It was unclear how different divisions had been affected.