More than 10 million people voted in favor of Elon Musk stepping down as Twitter’s chief executive in a poll he posted on the site on Sunday night.
But the billionaire, who bought the company and took over just 50 days ago, insisted there was no successor behind the scenes. “No one wants work that can actually keep Twitter alive,” he said on the social network. “There is no successor.” Reply to another user who said he could do the job, Musk added “you must love the pain a lot. One catch: you have to invest all your savings in Twitter and it’s been on the fast track to bankruptcy since May. Do you still want the job?
On Sunday, Musk asked Twitter users if he should step down as head of the company, promising to abide by his poll results.
As polls closed on Monday, 57.5% said he should step down.
As majority owner of the private company, no one can force Musk out. But a series of baffling decisions in recent days has caused even some of his closest supporters to cut ties with him.
The decision to ban an account that tracked the location of his private jet last week was followed by a mass suspension of critical journalists who reported on the ban. This in turn led to an exodus of some engaged users to other social networks, primarily its decentralized competitor Mastodon, whose own account was banned for posting a link to the jet tracker’s account on the platform. rival.
On Sunday, Musk reacted by banning all links to other social networks, including Mastodon, Instagram, Facebook, and even minor platforms such as Nostr, used by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, and Linktree, a tool for creating social networks. homepage favored by influencers.
This ban was reversed at the end of the day, following a Twitter poll by the Twitter Safety account, with musk saying that “In the future, there will be a vote for major policy changes. My excuses. This will not happen again. But the move was the last straw for some. Paul Graham, a British-American venture capitalist who had backed Musk a month earlier, said: “It’s remarkable how many people who have never run any kind of business think they know how to run a business better. tech company than someone who runs Tesla and SpaceX. Graham also called the move “the last straw” and told users they could find a link to his Mastodon profile on his personal website. His account has been suspended for the post.
Musk has a habit of using Twitter polls to approve major decisions, selling a tenth of his Tesla holdings after a survey in 2021restoration of donald trump account after a second last month and reinstate a strip of suspended accounts following a third. “Vox Populi, Vox Dei,” Musk tweeted after the Trump poll.
But in many cases, he gave the impression that he had already decided the outcome before posting: for example, he had already announced a sale of his Tesla holdings, well before putting it to the vote, and his plan to Reinstating Donald Trump had been discussed even before he bought Twitter. The decision to step down as chief executive had also been mooted long before the Twitter poll was published. On November 16, he told a Delaware judge that he planned to “reduce my time on Twitter and find someone else to manage Twitter over time.”