Elon Musk is says he will step down as CEO of Twitter two months after paying $44 billion for the social media platform.
On Tuesday, the Tesla co-founder responded to a previous social media poll in which he asked, “Should I step down as head of Twitter? I will abide by the results of the poll.”
He later shared the results that revealed 57.5 percent of people who voted said yes, while 42.5 percent said no.
Musk then tweeted in response: “I will resign as CEO as soon as I find someone foolish enough to take the job! After that, I will just run the software & servers teams.”
I will resign as CEO as soon as I find someone foolish enough to take the job! After that, I will just run the software & servers teams.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 21, 2022
Following his latest tweet, singer Dionne Warwick created a poll of her own asking users if she should be the next person to “take over” as Twitter CEO, quickly garnering over 1,000 likes and hundreds of retweets. Her son Damon Elliott responded, “I voted YES!”
The 51-year-old billionaire’s oversight as CEO began when he carried a kitchen sink into its San Francisco headquarters. Claims that he wasn’t even paying the rent at the office building were also made amid an epic tenure that was marred from the start by a mass exodus of thousands of employees who left by their own will or were forced out.
Users who once gravitated to the forum for its reputation as an egalitarian coffee house became increasingly alienated, and some accounts were deactivated by the businessman for challenging him, including notable journalists such as The Washington Post’s Taylor Lorenz and Drew Harwell, CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan, The New York Times’ Ryan Mac, independent journalist Aaron Rupar, Insider columnist Linette Lopez and former MSNBC host Keith Olbermann, among others.
Musk defended his actions, even though they were widely seen as anti-free speech.
“Same doxxing rules apply to ‘journalists’ as to everyone else,” Musk wrote on Twitter last week, adding in a follow-up tweet, “They posted my exact real-time location, basically assassination coordinates, in (obvious) direct violation of Twitter terms of service.”
He also responded to another user who accused him of having a “meltdown,” writing, “Criticizing me all day long is totally fine, but doxxing my real-time location and endangering my family is not.”
Musk also blocked links to upstart rival Mastodon – in a move which drew eyes from regulators – after the site provided information about ElonJet, and Musk accused it of tracking his aircraft.
The suspensions come after Musk tweeted last month, “My commitment to free speech extends even to not banning the account following my plane, even though that is a direct personal safety risk.”
He also wrote in April, “I hope that even my worst critics remain on Twitter, because that is what free speech means.”
On Sunday, Musk posted a poll to ask users if he should step down as head of Twitter, adding that he would “abide by the results of this poll.”
By the time the poll closed 12 hours later, 57.5 percent of 17.5 million votes cast were in favor of his departure.
Musk had been mum since the results were finalized, but he did caution on Sunday: “As the saying goes, be careful what you wish, as you might get it.”
In considering the options for a new CEO, Musk said that person “must like pain a lot” to run a business that “has been in the fast lane to bankruptcy since May.”
“No one wants the job who can actually keep Twitter alive,” Musk tweeted. “There is no successor.”
Musk’s rocky reign extended to the real world too, when he appeared at a Dave Chappelle stand-up show in San Francisco in early December, and “a good 80% of the stadium” was booing him. The Los Angeles Times reported at the time that the billionaire was booed for nearly five minutes.
Musk attempted to brush off the criticism, suggesting that only 10 percent of the crowd was booing him.
“Still, that’s a lot of boos, which is a first for me in real life (frequent on Twitter),” he tweeted.
[via]
