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Opendoor’s CEO is out — and the stock is soaring.
Carrie Wheeler, the chief executive of Opendoor Technologies, announced on Friday that she’s stepping down.
“The last weeks of intense outside interest in Opendoor have come at a time when the company needs to stay focused and charging ahead,” Wheeler said in a post on X. “I believe the best thing I can do for Opendoor now is to accelerate my succession plans.”
Opendoor shares spiked, with the stock up as much as 13% on Friday.
Wheeler’s departure comes amid Opendoor’s meme stock rally that has sent the residential real estate company’s share price up nearly 215% in the past month. The stock is up 104% so far this year.
Hedge fund manager Eric Jackson first drove the rally in July, when he posted that he believed OpenDoor “could be a 100-bagger over the next few years.”
Jackson told Business Insider last month that he doesn’t consider Opendoor a meme stock and that he’s in it for the long term.
(Regarding Wheeler’s departure, Jackson wrote on X that he “was on a livestream when she quit lol.”)
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Retail investors have flocked to OpenDoor’s stock, whipped up by Jackson’s bullishness and increasingly activist stance. The enthusiasm led investor and tech entrepreneur Anthony Pompliano to post that he, too, had purchased shares in the company this week.
A sharp uptick ensued, with the stock rising 26% in Wednesday’s session.
Wheeler joined Opendoor as CEO in 2022 and helped turn the company around.
“We went from $1 billion in losses when I took over, to announcing our first quarter of positive EBITDA in three years this past quarter,” she said in her social media post announcing her departure.
Jackson has criticized Wheeler’s leadership.
“You’ve got a CEO who never does interviews, sells stock constantly, and never buys,” he said in an interview earlier this month, adding that he’d be open to joining Opendoor’s board.
Opendoor is an institutional homebuyer, or iBuyer. It purchases homes in cash, makes the needed repairs, and resells them. After going public in 2020 via a SPAC, the company struggled, eventually falling more than 90% from its peak before Jackson rallied public support.
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