Spotify founder Daniel Ek becomes executive chairman
Spotify announced that founder and longtime CEO Daniel Ek will step down as CEO to become executive chairman, with current co-presidents Gustav Söderström and Alex Norström elevated to co-CEOs effective Jan. 1. The company said the change 'formalizes' how it has been operating since 2023; Spotify shares fell more than 5% in afternoon trading after the announcement. Ek said he will focus on long-term strategy and growth opportunities — including expansion in underpenetrated markets and investments in AI.
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🔍 Key Facts
- Daniel Ek will move from CEO to executive chairman and remain active in the business; he gave quotes about focusing on the 'long arc'.
- Gustav Söderström (Chief Product & Technology Officer) and Alex Norström (Chief Business Officer) will become co-CEOs and transition into the roles on Jan. 1.
- Spotify reported roughly 700 million subscribers and said its library includes more than 100 million songs, 7 million podcast titles and 350,000 audiobooks; shares fell >5% in trading after the news.
📍 Contextual Background
- OpenAI added an "Instant Checkout" feature to ChatGPT that lets users purchase products mentioned by the chatbot within the chat without leaving the app.
- Agentic commerce describes a model in which an app (for example, ChatGPT) acts as a shopper's agent by interacting with both the buyer and the seller while the merchant processes payment and fulfills the order.
- The Instant Checkout technology was co-developed by OpenAI and payment processor Stripe.
- U.S. federal law Section 230 provides online platforms with broad legal protections that allow them to make content-moderation decisions without being held liable for those decisions.
- Merchants pay ChatGPT a small fee on completed transactions processed via Instant Checkout.
- Amazon's "Buy for Me" feature lets shoppers request that Amazon make a purchase from a brand retailer's website on the shopper's behalf and takes customers to an Amazon checkout page to confirm order details including delivery address, applicable taxes and shipping fees, and payment method.
- A proposed $1.6 billion merger between Anywhere Real Estate and Compass was announced in September 2025.