Carrie Wheeler, CEO of the largest remaining iBuyer company, Opendoor, resigned on Friday after a month-long pressure campaign by retail stock traders and one of the company’s original cofounders.
The pressure followed weeks of fervent trading of the company’s stock, which had fallen to a low point of $.51 per share as of mid-July.
A flurry of trading, including as many as nearly two billion trades in a single day, drove Opendoor’s stock price up past $3 per share. But the rush of new and prominent investors came with calls for a change in leadership, specifically with demands for Wheeler’s resignation.
Wheeler resigned from her roles as CEO and board chair effective Friday. Shrisha Radhakrishna was named as president and interim leader of Opendoor while the company searches for a replacement CEO.
Wheeler previously served as the company’s chief financial officer before being named chief executive in December 2022, when co-founder and former CEO Eric Wu stepped down.
Eric Feder, a member of Opendoor’s board of directors and an executive at homebuilder Lennar, will serve as lead independent director of Opendoor during the transition from Wheeler.
The pressure campaign was led by Canadian investor Eric Jackson, who flooded the social media platform X with hundreds of posts calling for more investors to get behind Opendoor, as well as for changes to leadership.
Jackson, founder of EMJ Capital, demanded Wheeler’s resignation over the past week and also requested a seat on the board for himself or another prominent figure such as Keith Rabois, who co-founded Opendoor and joined Jackson in the pressure campaign.
“This community of $OPEN investors built in 3 weeks with me and my two dogs has been nothing short of incredible,” Jackson told Inman in a statement on Friday.
Jackson said that investors from across the world contacted him, saying they were investing in the company.
“They all wanted change in order to level up to the opportunity in front of OPEN,” Jackson said. “We got that today with grace and class from Carrie Wheeler. She’s a big shareholder and we all want to see her become a billionaire in the coming months. The board did its job. I said some tough things about this company but we’re all on the same team now. Let’s get Keith Rabois back on this board. Let’s inject some Founder DNA into this company’s veins again and let’s ride.”
Rabois had also been critical of Wheeler in recent days, saying at one point that “anyone off the street would perform better” than Wheeler in the CEO role.
Rabois has laid out his vision for the company, one that relies heavily on artificial intelligence to streamline operations.
He also suggested Opendoor needs to shift away from its core business model of buying homes with a fast cash offer to homeowners, renovating them and selling them, ideally at a profit.
Opendoor has burned through billions of dollars trying to prove out that business model, posting a profit in just two of 19 quarters since becoming public in December 2020.
Rabois said in a post on X that Opendoor should lean into financing options and making every mortgage assumable, along with unspecified changes, including some that would “kill agent partnership — aim to win instead of appeasement.”
