Microsoft has owned GitHub since 2018, but the widely used developer platform has operated with at least a little independence from the rest of the company, with its own separate CEO and other executives. But it looks like GitHub will be more fully folded into Microsoft's organizational chart starting next year—GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke announced today that he would be leaving GitHub and Microsoft "to become a founder again."
"GitHub and its leadership team will continue its mission as part of Microsoft’s CoreAI organization, with more details shared soon," Dohmke wrote. "I’ll be staying through the end of 2025 to help guide the transition and am leaving with a deep sense of pride in everything we’ve built as a remote-first organization spread around the world."
Axios reports that Microsoft isn't directly replacing Dohmke, and GitHub's leadership team will be reporting to multiple executives in the CoreAI division.
Dohmke was GitHub’s second CEO under Microsoft and had occupied the position since late 2021, when former CEO Nat Friedman left the company. Dohmke had previously been GitHub’s chief product officer.
Microsoft acquired GitHub for $7.5 billion in 2018. As of this writing it's the company's sixth-most-expensive acquisition, before you adjust for inflation—more than the roughly $7.2 billion it paid to buy Nokia's hardware division in 2013, but less than it paid for Skype in 2011 ($8.5 billion, shuttered earlier this year) or video game company ZeniMax Media in 2020 ($8.1 billion, hit by multiple rounds of gaming-related layoffs in 2024 and 2025).
Putting GitHub more directly under its AI umbrella makes some degree of sense for Microsoft, given how hard it has pushed tools like GitHub Copilot, an AI-assisted coding tool. Microsoft has continually iterated on GitHub Copilot since introducing it in late 2021, adding support for multiple language models and "agents" that attempt to accomplish plain-language requests in the background as you work on other things.
However, there have been problems, too. Copilot inadvertently exposed the private code repositories of a few major companies earlier this year. And a recent Stack Overflow survey showed that trust in AI-assisted coding tools' accuracy may be declining even as usage has increased, citing the extra troubleshooting and debugging work caused by "solutions that are almost right, but not quite."
It's unclear whether Dohmke's departure and the elimination of the CEO position will change much in terms of the way GitHub operates or the products it creates and maintains. As GitHub's CEO, Dohmke was already reporting to Julia Liuson, president of the company's developer division, and Liuson reported to Core AI group leader Jay Parikh. The CoreAI group itself is only a few months old—it was announced by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in January, and "build[ing] out GitHub Copilot" was already one of the group's responsibilities.
"Ultimately, we must remember that our internal organizational boundaries are meaningless to both our customers and to our competitors," wrote Nadella when he announced the formation of the CoreAI group.
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