More than 10 million people voted in favor of Elon Musk stepping down as the head of Twitter in a poll the billionaire created and said he would abide by the results.
The tech billionaire, who also runs Tesla and Space X, had asked Twitter users on Sunday whether he should step down as the leader of the social media site. The verdict was clear. About 57.5% of the 17.5 million votes cast were in favor of Musk stepping back from the leadership role.
Musk went silent on the platform for much of the day and later confirmed he will step down as the chief executive officer of Twitter after finding a successor. However, he plans to retain control over the engineering teams. “I will resign as CEO as soon as I find someone foolish enough to take the job!” he wrote in a tweet. “After that, I will just run the software & servers teams.”
Musk has a history of using Twitter polls on substantial issues facing the social media platform, including whether to reinstate the journalists that he had suspended from Twitter, for which he was broadly criticized in and out of media circles.
Are Twitter voting rules changing? Roughly 12 hours after the poll ended, Musk suggested that only those who pay for Twitter’s updated subscription service should get to vote. After one Twitter user suggested that “Blue subscribers should be the only ones that can vote in policy related polls,” Musk responded: “Good point. Twitter will make that change.” Twitter Blue is a paid-for subscription that allows anyone to buy a blue tick for their account.
Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion in late October. The weeks since then have been marked by a flurry of changes including mass layoffs with at least 5,000 of Twitter’s 7,500 employees fired or departed, falling advertising sales, and a rollout of Twitter’s paid-for verification feature which was put on pause following a wave of parody accounts impersonating former presidents, celebrities, and organizations. The feature was relaunched last week.
He has also been criticized for his approach to content moderation and was condemned by the United Nations and European Union over the decision to suspend some journalists who cover the social media firm.
1 comment
Comments are closed.