I'm afraid to post this to /r/ethereum, because I suspect it would be downvoted to Hades. If someone is feeling brave, feel free to cross-post there.

Buried in their dev update (http://blog.ethereum.org/2014/06/05/ethereum-project-update/):

The most recent phase of business activity involved strong attention to the legalities of the sale and Charles Hoskinson was ideal to lead that effort. But that effort is now substantially complete and Charles will be moving on to other activities in the space.

Background: this is not the first major project Charles has left (he also left bitshares). I'd be curious to learn how friendly the parting is (he could be leaving to start a project ON ETHEREUM for all we know).

I learned about this from a guy who was recently gossiping about our project (Mastercoin), incorrectly saying that we were planning to make all our users register with FinCEN. When I read the rest of his tweets, I found this: https://twitter.com/BryceWeiner/status/477507984319197184

Charles Hoskinson quits #Ethereum before the actual sale of shares and the damage control machine goes into action.

http://blog.ethereum.org/2014/06/05/ethereum-project-update/ …

I can't find anybody talking about this ANYWHERE (which maybe means the ethereum PR machine is really good, since I believe he was CEO of Ethereum). I'm starting this conversation here in hopes that someone can provide more info about what happened.

Edit: I took the plunge and posted this to /r/ethereum after all: http://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/282s03/ethereum_ceo_charles_hoskinson_will_be_moving_on/ ("vitalik said 'it was a complicated situation internally'... reminiscent of when he was asked to leave bitshares team. Not something to be unhappy about.")

We'll see what happens.

Edit2: Found this was actually posted to Ethereum already before my post (which had a typo on the URL): http://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/27eb38/ethereum_project_update/ ("Charles may still consult for the project. The decision was mutual. Ethereum is still on track in all of its activities.")