A guerrilla campaign against Opendoor CEO Carrie Wheeler has succeeded.
Wheeler announced her resignation on Friday, effective immediately. She will remain a part of the company as an advisor to the board of directors through the end of the year.
The board named chief technology officer Shrisha Radhakrishna as president of the company and interim CEO, and has begun a “comprehensive search process to identify a permanent successor,” according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Wheeler’s resignation after three years at the helm of the company marks another twist in what has become a summer-long saga for the struggling iBuyer.
Entering July, the company’s stock price had been trading for under $1 for almost two straight months, putting it at risk of delisting and leading the board to consider a stock 50-to-1 stock split when a surge of investment activity in the middle of the month caused its stock to jump nearly threefold in a matter of days.
The turnaround was spurred by posts on the social media platform X by Eric Jackson, a hedge fund manager at EMJ Capital, whose previous claim to fame was engineering the resurgence of automobile e-commerce website Carvana in 2022.
Since then, Jackson has taken an activist approach with the iBuyer, and following a poorly received company earnings call on Aug. 5, began to call for Wheeler’s resignation.
“I think she’s gotta go,” he said of Wheeler following the earnings call.
Keith Rabois, a veteran technology executive and co-founder of Opendoor, was among the voices criticizing the direction of the company and Wheeler’s leadership.
“The company needs a new CEO. If I can be involved in identifying, assessing and or closing the proper candidate, I’ll be happy to be involved,” Rabois told the TBPN podcast this week, adding he wasn’t looking to be a full-time executive.
The company’s fixed costs were obstructing its ability to adapt to the residential market’s ups and downs, according to Rabois, and management has so far failed to include innovation in its directives.
“They think about moving one basis point here, one there, versus innovating,” Rabois said. “There is no reason this shouldn’t be a $50- to $100-billion-dollar company, you just need the right leadership and we’re going to fix that.”
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Residential
National
Investors’ Opendoor angst lands on CEO Carrie Wheeler
Residential
National
Window may be closing on Opendoor as it faces delisting