23andMe co-founder lashes out at CEO Wojcicki after bankruptcy filing, says board lacked oversight
A view of the 23andMe headquarters in Sunnyvale, California, on March 25, 2025.
Tayfun Coskun | Anadolu | Getty Images
23andMe co-founder Linda Avey took to social media on Wednesday to express frustration about the fate of the once-thriving genetic testing company that spiraled into Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection this week.
Avey helped launch 23andMe in 2006 alongside Paul Cusenza and Anne Wojcicki, who resigned as CEO on Friday. The company went mainstream due to its popular at-home DNA testing kits, but struggled in recent years to generate recurring revenue, stand up viable therapeutics and research businesses and assuage privacy concerns.
“My time at the company was cut short in 2009, when my co-founder Anne convinced the board that she should run the company,” Avey wrote in a post on social media site X. “And I must be honest, I was frustrated with the direction the company took after that point.”
23andMe, which reached a peak market cap of about $6 billion, was worth around $14 million as of market close on Wednesday.
“Without continued consumer-focused product development, and without governance, 23andMe lost its way, and society missed a key opportunity in furthering the idea of personalized health,” Avey wrote.
Last March, 23andMe’s independent directors formed a special committee to evaluate the company’s potential paths forward. All seven members resigned from the board in September and said they disagreed with Wojcicki about the “strategic direction for the company.”
“After my departure, she architected a majority vote for herself that eliminated board governance, even as it expanded over the following funding rounds,” Avey said. “For better or worse, the buck stopped with her. It came as no surprise when the board resigned last year.”
Wojcicki submitted multiple proposals to take the company private herself, but all were rejected, even after the company appointed new board members. The special committee “unanimously determined to reject” Wojcicki’s most recent proposal earlier this month.
If 23andMe’s Chapter 11 plan is approved by the court, the company will “actively solicit qualified bids” over a 45-day process. Wojcicki still plans to pursue the company as an independent bidder, she said in a post on X on Monday.
“There are many cautionary tales buried in the 23andMe story,” Avey said. “Striking a balance between the desire for founder control and board oversight is essential; otherwise, why have a board at all?”
23andMe did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky said he wants to integrate ChatGPT artificial intelligence capabilities into the travel platform but the software isn’t ready.
“The [software development kit] wasn’t quite robust enough for the things we want to do,” he told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Wednesday.
Chesky said the company would “probably” want to integrate ChatGPT eventually.
Airbnb on Tuesday launched a series of new social features, such as direct messaging, to its platform. The update also included a personalized version of the company’s chatbot launched earlier this year that can cancel and change reservations for users in North America.
In an interview with Bloomberg this week, Chesky said that the OpenAI chatbot isn’t “quite ready” for integration with Airbnb. He said the model was made using 13 different chatbots and that Airbnb is depending heavily on Alibaba’s Qwen model.
Chesky, who is a close friend of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, said it’s only the beginning of the AI revolution and he expects the technology to fuel a consumer app craze over the next few years.
“We’re all going to have to work together,” he said. “AI is going to lift up a lot of companies. If they want to vertically integrate every single thing, that’s going to be very, very difficult.”
OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta Platforms.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Meta will lay off roughly 600 employees within its artificial intelligence unit as the company looks to reduce layers and operate more nimbly, a spokesperson confirmed to CNBC on Wednesday.
The company announced the cuts in a memo from its Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang, who was hired in June as part of Meta’s $14.3 billion investment in Scale AI. Workers across Meta’s AI infrastructure units, Fundamental Artificial Intelligence Research unit and other product-related positions will be impacted.
Axios was first to report the cuts.
Meta has been aggressively investing in AI as it works to keep pace with rivals like OpenAI and Google, pouring billions of dollars into infrastructure projects and recruitment.
On Tuesday, the company announced a $27 billion deal with Blue Owl Capital to fund and develop its massive Hyperion data center in rural Louisiana. The data center is expected to be large enough to cover a “significant part of the footprint of Manhattan,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a post in July.
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