Billionaire Elon Musk has announced he will step down as Twitter CEO, with a new female boss taking the reigns of the social media platform.
The Twitter chief has said he has hired a woman to take over him as the network's chief executive officer but has not yet revealed her identity.
Elon, who bought Twitter in October 2022, announced the news in a tweet and said the new leader will take over within about six weeks.
He said: "Excited to announce that I’ve a new CEO for X/Twitter. She will be starting in ~6 weeks!
"My role will transition to being exec chair & CTO, overseeing product, software & sysops."
His post, uploaded at 8:48pm BST, attracted thousands of retweets and likes within minutes, and Twitter's shares jumped more than 2 per cent immediately after the announcement.
The move comes amid spiking controversy over the leadership and the future of the highly influential platform.
Musk has been Twitter's owner and CEO for seven months, after acquiring the social media company for $44 billion.
During his reign, he has carried out massive layoffs as part of cost-cutting efforts.
Twitter's workforce has been slashed to about 1,500 employees from about 8,000 previously, with the billionaire describing it as something 'that had to be done.'
Musk has been saying that he plans to find a new CEO for San Francisco-based Twitter, insisting he is not the company's permanent CEO.
In mid-November, just a few weeks after buying the social media platform for $44 billion, he told a Delaware court that he does not want to be the CEO of any company.
While testifying, Musk said: “I expect to reduce my time at Twitter and find somebody else to run Twitter over time.”
More than a month later, he tweeted in December: “I will resign as CEO as soon as I find someone foolish enough to take the job.”
The pledge came after millions of Twitter users asked him to step down in a Twitter poll the billionaire himself created and promised to abide by.
In February, he told a conference he anticipated finding a CEO for Twitter “probably toward the end of this year.”
Shares of Tesla rose about 2% on Thursday after Musk made the announcement. Shareholders of the electric car company have been concerned about how much of Musk's attention is being spent on Twitter.
Last November, he was questioned in court about how he splits his time among Tesla and his other companies, including SpaceX and Twitter.
Musk said at the time he never intended to be CEO of Tesla, and that he didn’t want to be chief executive of any other companies either, preferring to see himself as an engineer.
He also said he expected an organisational restructuring of Twitter to be completed in the next week or so. It’s been nearly six months since he said that.
Bantering with Twitter followers late last year, Musk expressed pessimism about the prospects for a new CEO, saying that person “must like pain a lot” to run a company that “has been in the fast lane to bankruptcy.”
“No one wants the job who can actually keep Twitter alive. There is no successor,” Musk tweeted at the time.
