Activision Blizzard CEO and president Daniel Alegre is set to leave the company for a blockchain startup in early 2023, the executive revealed. The news of this departure comes less than three years after Activision Blizzard hired Alegre to replace its former COO Coddy Johnson.
Before joining Activision Blizzard in April 2020, Alegre spent 16 years at Google, where he worked in a variety of roles, culminating in a 30-month stint as president of global retail, shopping and payments. During his time with the Alphabet-owned company, the industry veteran oversaw Google’s expansion in Latin America and the Asia Pacific. He was also part of the management team that led the tech giant’s initial transition into mobile operating systems, starting with the introduction of Android in 2008. According to SEC filings, Activision Blizzard spent over ten million dollars just to pull Alegre away from Google.
Alegre is now set to join blockchain startup Yuga Labs as its new CEO in the first half of 2023. The company’s current CEO, Nicole Muniz, will continue to serve in an advisory role when Alegre takes the helm. Yuga Labs is best known as the creator of the Bored Ape Yacht Club, a collection of non-fungible tokens (NFT) powered by the Ethereum blockchain. The company was the subject of some controversy in April 2022 after a large-scale Bored Ape Yacht Club hack cost users millions of dollars in losses.
Although quite short, Alegre’s tenure at Activision Blizzard was far from uneventful. Most notably, the outgoing COO oversaw a major leadership shakeup at the company prompted by a gender discrimination and sexual harassment lawsuit filed against the conglomerate by the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing in the summer of 2021. Then, it was Alegre who announced that then-Blizzard president J. Allen Brack was stepping down themselves in the immediate aftermath of the scandal.
Alegre will stay with Activision Blizzard until the end of his current term as COO, which is scheduled to end on March 31, 2023. The Santa Monica, California-based company has yet to name his replacement, presumably because the search for the new COO is still ongoing .
Activision Blizzard is still in the process of trying to get regulatory approval for its proposed merger with Microsoft. The tech giant agreed to a $68.7 billion cash takeover of Activision Blizzard in January 2022, but the deal has hit some regulatory roadblocks in recent months, with everyone from the FTC to the European Commission now investigating the acquisition on antitrust grounds.
