Elon Musk may be close to ending his run as Twitter CEO.
After haphazardly establishing a ban on links to certain social platforms that put his site at odds with both The Washington Post’s Taylor Lorenz and his own supporters, like Silicon Valley venture capitalist Paul Graham, Musk’s doxxing, banning, and moderation outburst ended — predictably — with an apology and a promise it “won’t happen again.”
All Musk needs from his captive audience is a little more attention, with a promise that there will be votes about “major policy changes” in the future.
Should I step down as head of Twitter? I will abide by the results of this poll.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 18, 2022
The first change put to a vote? Musk’s role as Chief Twit, which closed overnight with nearly 58 percent of the almost 18 million votes saying he should step down from the job.
It’s unclear how many of those votes came from investors in Musk’s electric car company, Tesla, where the stock price has dropped to a 52-week low of about $150 per share, down nearly 50 percent from a year ago. Musk recently dropped to number two on Forbes’s list of the world’s richest people. Tesla is currently up nearly 5 percent in premarket trading on news of the poll results.
Reuters reports that Tesla’s third-largest individual investor and self-proclaimed Musk fanboy KoGuan Leo tweeted earlier this week that “Elon abandoned Tesla and Tesla has no working CEO.” Earlier this morning, Leo tweeted again, saying, “I wish Elon quickly finds new CEO of Twitter.”
His $44 billion takeover of the company — that he tried desperately and unsuccessfully to get out of — started with a poll, and it would be both appropriate and timely if his time as its CEO ended the same way.
Even before Musk owned the company, there were reports that he planned to operate as Twitter’s CEO only temporarily, and just one month ago, he said under oath that he planned to find someone else to run the company. In follow-up tweets, Musk claimed the company “has been in the fast lane to bankruptcy since May” (not the first time he’s used the b-word in reference to Twitter — he mentioned it in a company meeting last month) and said, “The question is not finding a CEO, the question is finding a CEO who can keep Twitter alive.”
Now, with his decision-making under fire from the same people who had been his supporters and his handpicked #TwitterFiles journalist ghosting his pleas for a public response, Musk may be ready to put his overpriced toy in someone else’s hands for a little while.
By Richard Lawler (theverge.com)
