Hoda Kotb Is Overwhelmed by Fan Support After Today Show Exit News

Hoda Kotb is feeling the love from fans after announcing she will soon be leaving the Today show after 26 years at NBC.

“Happy Friday … thank you for the beautiful posts and notes. I’ve read them all,” Kotb, 60, wrote via Instagram on Friday, September 27. “It’s almost too much for my heart to carry … so I will let it overflow — I love you more than you know … this post spoke to me #joy.”

Kotb shared her message alongside a clip featuring an inspirational quote. “When you finally realize that Joy is less fireworks, more firefly, less orchestra, more birdsong, she will come back much more often,” a voiceover says in the video over footage of a picturesque forest. “For Joy will not fight with the fast pace of this life. She is not in the shiny or the new. She breathes in the basic, simmers in the simple and dances in the daily to and fro.”

The quote continued: “Joy has been beckoning you for many a year, my friend. You are just too busy doing, to see. The very next time Joy wraps her quiet warmth around you, as the garden embraces your weary body in its wildness, tip her a nod. She doesn’t stay long. But if you are a gracious host, Joy comes back.”

Kotb announced her Today exit on the morning show’s Thursday, September 26, episode, after which she shared a brief message of thanks via Instagram. “Happy thursday xx and thank you❤️,” she wrote alongside another inspirational quote, which read, “By the way, I’m wearing the smile you gave me.”

On Thursday’s Today episode, Kotb explained that she decided to leave the show shortly after turning 60. “And it was such a monumental moment for me when I turned 60 years old because I started thinking about that decade, like, what does that decade mean? What does it hold? What’s it gonna have for me?” she stated. “And I realized that it was time for me to turn the page at 60 and to try something new.”

Referring to her special 60th birthday celebration episodes last month, Kotb continued: “I remembered standing outside, looking at this beautiful bunch of people with all these gorgeous signs, and I thought, ‘This is what the top of the wave feels like for me,’ and I thought, ‘It can’t get better.’ And [I] decided this is the right time for me to, kind of, move on.”

Her role as a mother to her two daughters — Haley, 7, and Hope, 5 — also had a large influence on her choice to step back. “I had my kiddos late in life, and I was thinking they deserve a bigger piece of my time, the pie that I have,” Kotb, who shares her kids with ex-fiancé Joel Schiffman, shared. “I feel like we only have a finite amount of time. And so, with all that being said, this is the hardest thing in the world.”

Kotb concluded her announcement by revealing she will remain on the show through January 2025 and will stay in the NBC family for her next career steps.

It has not been announced who will replace Kotb as Savannah Guthrie’s coanchor and Jenna Bush Hager’s Today With Hoda & Jenna cohost. However, an NBC insider exclusively told Us Weekly on Thursday that “the big contender who everyone at the network is talking about is Laura Jarrett — she has a really strong chance.”

The insider added: “She’s the anchor of Weekend Today; she is a lawyer like Savannah. She’s a darling at the Today show who has risen up very quickly.”

Kotb’s exit news prompted tearful reactions from her Today colleagues, particularly Bush Hager, 42. “Hoda told me just a couple days ago, and when she told me, my first reaction, it was from my gut and it was almost crazy. … I said, ‘No, you can’t leave,’” Bush Hager, 42, said while sobbing on Thursday’s Hoda & Jenna.

Bush Hager noted that she told her father, former President George W. Bush, about Hoda’s departure via a phone call on Wednesday, September 25. “He said, ‘Oh, she’s leaving ‘cause it’s time, and you’re gonna be fine. It’s your turn. It’s OK,’” she said.

Kotb responded by standing up and applauding her friend before stating, “It’s your turn. And whoever sits in this seat, whoever sits in this seat, is going to have the easiest job in the world ‘cause they’re sitting next to you.”