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The bond king heard rumblings of a palace coup.

William H. Gross, who helped build Pimco from scratch into a $2 trillion mutual fund behemoth over four decades, abruptly quit on Friday for a much smaller firm.

The surprising exit came after Mr. Gross learned in recent weeks that top executives at Pimco and Allianz, the German insurer that owns it, had grown tired of his leadership and were weighing a change.

Some executives were pushing for him to be removed as chief investment officer, said two people briefed on the matter. There was concern about his management style and that his increasingly erratic behavior — he appeared at a conference to give a speech wearing sunglasses and wrote an investor letter that was largely an elegy to his cat — was becoming a distraction.

An ouster like that would have been a startling end of a long career for the 70-year-old investor, who broadened the appeal of bond funds to smaller individual investors and made them a staple of pension plans and retirement accounts.

Mr. Gross had helped make Pimco a powerhouse in virtually every market for bonds in the world. In the process, he became the face of the firm and an elder statesman of sorts, as his monthly investment letters and numerous appearance on business television programs were closely followed by investors.

But this year has been a rough one for Mr. Gross.

The giant $221.6 billion bond fund, Pimco Total Return Fund, which Mr. Gross personally managed, has posted mediocre performance this year. Investors have pulled some $25 billion out of the fund this year and $68 billion over the last 16 months.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has been investigating whether a $3.6 billion exchange-traded fund actively managed by Mr. Gross inflated its performance numbers.

A little more than a week ago, seeing signs that his position was in peril, Mr. Gross began reaching out to others in the bond world to see if he could land another job.

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One of those people Mr. Gross contacted was Jeffrey Gundlach, who himself was forced out of a major asset management firm in 2009 before co-founding his own firm, DoubleLine Capital.

Mr. Gross also reached out to the Janus Capital Group, led by Richard M. Weil, who had worked for Mr. Gross at Pimco.

Mr. Gundlach said on Friday that when he talked to Mr. Gross, the Pimco co-founder seemed angry and was convinced he was about to be fired.

“I was wondering if they would have the courage or audacity to fire him,” said Mr. Gundlach, whose firm is one that could benefit if investor money continues to leave Pimco after the resignation of Mr. Gross. “They wanted him to resign and say something like, ‘I’m leaving in six months.’ Bill didn’t want to do that.”

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The resignation of Mr. Gross, who is estimated to be worth $2.3 billion, took Wall Street by surprise.

John Brynjolfsson, a former longtime Pimco trader who now runs a hedge fund, Armored Wolf, said he was stunned by the news, saying, “I think Bill Gross loved Pimco more than himself.”

Share of Janus soared 43 percent on the news that Mr. Gross was joining the firm to manage a new fund called the Janus Global Unconstrained Bond Fund. Mr. Gross will oversee the fund from an office that Janus, which is based in Denver, intends to open in Newport Beach, Calif., where Pimco has long been based.

The timing of the departure of Mr. Gross even seemed to catch Pimco and Allianz off guard, despite the behind-the-scenes planning to remove him. By late afternoon Friday, photographs of Mr. Gross, his biography and well-read monthly investment letters still appeared prominently displayed on the Pimco website.

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Late Friday, Pimco began to reshape its organization without Mr. Gross at the helm. The firm said Daniel J. Ivascyn, who had been a deputy chief investment officer, would succeed Mr. Gross as group chief investment officer of the firm. To run the firm’s flagship fund, the Total Return Fund, formerly managed by Mr. Gross, it will now take three people: Mark Kiesel, Scott Mather and Mihir Worah.

Mr. Gross said in a statement: “I look forward to returning my full focus to the fixed-income markets and investing, giving up many of the complexities that go with managing a large, complicated organization.” Mr. Gross added that he wished his former colleagues at Pimco well.

An Allianz spokeswoman said the decision to leave the firm was made by Mr. Gross. Douglas M. Hodge, Pimco’s chief executive, said the firm’s succession plan was in place and would not be altered by the resignation of Mr. Gross.

“While we are grateful for everything Bill contributed to building our firm and delivering value to Pimco’s clients, over the course of this year it became increasingly clear that the firm’s leadership and Bill have fundamental differences about how to take Pimco forward,” Mr. Hodge said.

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With Mr. Gross and his onetime No. 2, Mohamed A. El-Erian, now both gone from Pimco, one of the world’s biggest money managers suddenly has lost two of its most public faces in less than a year. Mr. El-Erian remains an employee of Allianz.

When Mr. El-Erian announced in January he was resigning from Pimco, it came as shock to the market. How investors — both retail and institutional — will react to the exit of Mr. Gross in the coming days is still unclear.

“We will see a range of reactions,” said Michael Herbst, a Morningstar director of research for active strategies for North America. “One thing to note is that while Bill Gross gets a lot of the headlines, Pimco isn’t a one-man show.”

Robert D. Klausner, a lawyer in Florida who represents a number of public pension funds, said two pension funds had already contacted him about beginning to examine whether they should remain invested with Pimco.

An official with one state pension fund said a Pimco representative had contacted him to discuss Mr. Gross’s departure.

Todd Rosenbluth, director of mutual fund research at Standard & Poor’s Capital IQ, said the big questions for Pimco were whether investors would have confidence in the new management team and whether other Pimco portfolio managers would follow Mr. Gross out the door.

At Pimco, Mr. Gross ran the firm with something of an iron fist, preferring a quiet trading floor. He was displeased if employees were not at their desks before dawn in California to prepare for the start of the trading day in New York. The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this year that Mr. Gross and Mr. El-Erian openly feuded at times — a rarity at Pimco.

In recent years, Mr. Gross’s Total Return Fund has drawn criticism for its reliance on derivatives — future and credit-default swaps — to get exposure to bonds. Historically, the fund had long used derivatives to buy bonds, in part, because it needed to make extremely large purchases because of its mammoth size.

Still, Mr. Gross’s long-term track record is an enviable one. Over the last 10 years, the Total Return Fund has returned 6 percent, besting the comparable 1.4 percent gain in the Barclays U.S. Aggregate Bond Index over the same time period. The decade-long performance of the Total Return Fund puts the portfolio in the top 5 percent in its category, according to Morningstar.

It was those years of performance, coupled with frequent appearances on television, that crowned Mr. Gross with the unofficial title of the bond king.

Bill Gross Made Pimco’s Investing Engaging With Farcical Antics Bill Gross has long been one of the most respected investors on Wall Street. He has also been one of the most colorful.