Elon Musk has said he will step down as the chief executive of Twitter while continuing to be in charge of the social media company’s software and server teams. In response to a Twitter poll he created that voted in favour of him leaving his position as head of Twitter, Musk Tuesday said he will resign as CEO as soon as he finds “someone foolish enough to take the job”. The poll received more than 17 million votes, with a decisive majority — close to 58 per cent — voting that Musk should step down as the head of Twitter. In what is becoming a defining feature of his reign over Twitter, Musk has previously adhered to decisions made in such informal referendums, including reinstating former US President Donald Trump’s account. What this could mean for Twitter While Musk had earlier said that he will abide by the results of the Twitter poll, it is unlikely that much would change even if Musk were to actually keep his word and step down as CEO. He has made it clear that he will still be in charge of Twitter’s software and server teams, and given that the microblogging platform largely consists of those two teams after the mass layoffs at the company, Musk could still retain direct control over Twitter. In his other companies such as Tesla and SpaceX, Musk maintains a high degree of control over the product, and given that at the end of the day he also owns Twitter, his latest move may not necessarily put an end to the ebbs and flows that the social networking site has gone through since he took control of it in October. In a separate tweet, Musk said, “No one wants the job who can actually keep Twitter alive. There is no successor”. However, it is worth noting that the results of the poll gave a boost to the stock price of Tesla, which has fallen more than $100 since November 1, seemingly as investors believed that Musk would start spending more time at the electric car company. Musk’s reliance on unscientific Twitter polls In the short time of his ownership of Twitter, Musk has taken policy decisions on the basis of the polls he creates. He has also indicated that this could be a norm for the company going forward, despite acknowledging multiple times that bots and fake accounts were influencing the results of such polls. In response to a tweet which speculated that bots may have influenced the results of the poll on Musk’s leadership of Twitter, he tweeted “interesting”. Hours before launching that poll, Musk was publicly criticised for a controversial new policy that had banned links to certain other social media platforms such as Facebook, Mastodon and link aggregator Linktree. The policy was deleted within 24 hours after its introduction and Musk said that “going forward”, he would poll Twitter’s users to let them decide on policy changes. Last month, Twitter had reinstated Donald Trump’s account on the basis of a poll run by Musk, where users on the social media platform voted — by a slim majority — to lift a ban on the former US president placed more than a year ago.
