The Twitter CEO change was 'quite surprising' as there was 'no transition period': Analyst

Bernstein Vice President and U.S. Internet Analyst Mark Shmulik weighs in on the breaking announcement that Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is stepping down from the company and will be succeeded by CTO Parag Agrawal.

Video transcript

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JARED BLIKRE: Welcome back to Yahoo Finance Live, I'm Jared Blikre along with Akiko Fujita. Zack Guzman has the day off and markets are still bouncing back from the worst Thanksgiving in 90 years. And we're going to take a quick look at the markets right now. We can see the Dow is the laggard but it's still up over 200 points. The S&P 500 up over 1%. And the NASDAQ is the leader up about 1 and 1/2, 1 and 3/4 upper percent.

And one stock on the move, excuse me, is Twitter, and that is after news that Jack Dorsey will be stepping down. In fact, he already did that today. And Bernstein's Mark Shmulik joins us now on the phone to discuss. And Mark thanks for jumping on the phone with us here. What are you making of this news. It was kind of anticipated that there would be some kind of a shakeup, but why do you think today?

MARK SHMULIK: Yeah. First off, thanks for having me and secondly, I don't know why today because I believe it's a internal holiday over at Twitter for Twitter employees. So that might have something to do with it. But it was certainly a very sudden announcement, you know? I think caught a lot of folks off guard. So certainly, rumblings kind of around for a while. And I think what surprised me the most is just the immediacy of it, you know? There's no transition period that Jack's already stepped down. He's out of the CEO role. Parag's taking over. So quite surprising from my seat.