Elon Musk: ‘I Will Resign as CEO’ of Twitter

Following a survey that led to 57% of the respondents choosing to have him quit, Musk tweets that he is willing to do so when he has the right replacement.

Elon Musk is a fan of the decision of Twitter’s users, at least. Musk posted on Twitter on Tuesday that he’d like to step down as CEO of Twitter until he has found the right replacement. This follows a poll that which the Twitter owner published on Sunday that asked Twitter users to vote on whether they would like him to retire as the CEO of Twitter. More than 57% of respondents voted in favor of Musk taking a leave of absence.

“I am resigning as CEO when I can find someone stupid enough to be able to fill the position!” Musk posted on behalf of the 112.5 million Twitter followers Tuesday. “After that, I’ll simply manage the servers and software teams

More than 17.5 million people participated for Musk in the poll. Twitter overall had around 238 million daily users as of the close of June.

This billionaire is the CEO of the car manufacturer Tesla and the rocket-maker SpaceX is known for his habit of changing his mind shortly after the announcement or implementation.

The sudden declaration of intention to quit the post of the highest-ranking executive at the struggling social media company is nearly two months following Musk’s purchase. Under his direction, Twitter has faced massive reductions in staff, lawsuits by former employees, a cut in the amount of money it spends from advertisers as well as a sudden change in policy and international outrage when it removed journalists and other notable users. Prior to when Musk concluded the deal to purchase Twitter on October 1, he was only planning to remain the CEO for a short period until he handed over the reigns.

Musk’s reign as Twitter’s CEO has been punctuated by new policies that caused anger among customers and advertisers. The month of October saw Twitter temporarily launched the feature that let users pay $8 to get the “blue check” confirmation. The feature was soon used by people who created accounts to impersonate companies like Nintendo as well as Coke. In the most famous instance, the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly saw its stock fall after a fake Twitter account posted on Twitter “We are thrilled to announce that insulin is no longer cost.”

He followed up the week before by suspending the accounts of reporters from media outlets that were critical of his administration, including The Washington Post, The New York Times and CNN. They were reinstated after Musk asked users to vote, with nearly 59% of which supported immediately the suspensions’ repeal.

Twitter has also banned more than twenty-six accounts on the site which made use of publicly available information about flight routes to track the locations of private aircrafts. Musk claimed that the account was giving “assassination coordinates” through monitoring the movements of his private jet and connected them to an allegation of stalking case that occurred within Los Angeles. The Washington Post reported Sunday that police did not have any connection.

After a string of policy shifts that were dramatic, for which Musk appeared to apologize on Sunday after which he said that there will be a vote on any major change to come.