Twitter users voted on Monday to oust CEO Elon Musk in an online poll he organised and promised to honour, just weeks after he took over as head of the social media giant.
He asked users “Should I step down as head of Twitter? I will abide by the results of this poll.” and 57.5 percent of more than 17 million accounts said he should go — with Musk not yet responding to the result.
“Should I step down as head of Twitter?” he tweeted, asking the site’s users to click yes or no.
While the poll was live, Musk engaged followers, saying he did not have a replacement lined up.
“No one wants the job who can actually keep Twitter alive. There is no successor,” he said.
Making a “fun suggestion” to Musk, MIT research scientist Lex Fridman offered to run the platform for a bit for no salary.
In a downbeat response, Musk said Twitter was “in the fast lane to bankruptcy.”
“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?” Musk asked.
The unpredictable billionaire posted the poll shortly after apparently acknowledging he had made a mistake banning Twitter users from promoting their accounts on rival social media platforms.
“Going forward, there will be a vote for major policy changes. My apologies. Won’t happen again,” he tweeted.
The sudden shift in the rules was the latest in a series of controversial changes made by Musk since he took over the company in October — upheaval that has led a growing number of users to encourage followers to view their posts on other sites.
Twitter had announced that the company would “no longer allow free promotion of specific social media platforms.”
Users would thus be barred, for example, from posting “Follow me @username on Instagram,” Twitter said.
Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey questioned the new policy with a one-word tweet: “Why?”
After some notable accounts were suspended under the new policy, including tech investor Paul Graham, Musk tweeted that instead of considering individual tweets, the policy would be limited to “suspending accounts only when that account’s *primary* purpose is promotion of competitors.”
