Will Elon Musk Step Down as Twitter CEO?

Is it possible that  Elon Musk is going to step down as the CEO of the company he just bought for $44 billion?

Following a chaotic six weeks in charge of the platform, Musk on Sunday night posted a poll asking his 122 million followers if he should “step down as the head of Twitter.” The Tesla CEO added that he would “abide by the results of this poll.”

While the vote was still on-going Musk tweeted: “As the saying goes, be careful what you wish, as you might get it.”

The 12-hour poll closed at 6:20am on Monday morning with over 17.5 million Twitter users voting. The final result saw 57% of voters decide that Musk should step down.

The Twitter owner did not immediately comment on the poll’s outcome, but in tweets he made late on Sunday night, it does not appear as if there is a successor ready to step into the role.

“No one wants the job who can actually keep Twitter alive. There is no successor,” Musk tweeted.

A number of people offered to take the top job. When MIT research scientist and podcast host Lex Fridman offered to run Twitter for free to “focus on great engineering and increasing the amount of love in the world,” Musk responded “You must like pain a lot. One catch: you have to invest your life savings in Twitter and it has been in the fast lane to bankruptcy since May. Still want the job?”

Later, Musk cryptically tweeted: “Those who want power are the ones who least deserve it.”

Since taking control of Twitter in late October, Musk has created a whirlwind of chaos at the company.

He has fired up to two-thirds of Twitter’s staff, implemented policy changes on a whim only to reverse course hours later, and has welcomed back to Twitter hundreds of far-right extremist accounts that were banned previously for spreading hate speech on the platform.

This chaos has continued over the last few weeks. Days after giving select journalists access to internal Twitter documents as part of a series of not-very-revelatory revelations he dubbed the Twitter Files, Musk suspended a number of different journalists from the platform for reporting or tweeting about an open source website that tracks the flight paths of private jets, including Musk’s. 

Earlier on Sunday, Twitter implemented a new rule that banned all links to a host of other social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, and Truth Social. The wholesale ban on links to other sites, however, was quickly overturned and will now apparently only be enforced against accounts whose “primary purpose is the promotion of competitors,” Musk tweeted on Sunday.

Musk has also run several polls similar to the one he posted Sunday about remaining CEO of Twitter. The most recent was a poll about whether he should reinstate the accounts of the journalists he banned.

To date, Musk has always followed through on the result of those polls.