Elon Musk. Image: Thomas Hawk (CC BY-NC 2.0)
Musk previously said that he planned to find somebody else to run Twitter, while his handling of the company has impacted Tesla stocks.
Elon Musk has said he will resign as the CEO of Twitter.
Musk had asked Twitter users in recent days to vote on whether he should step down as head of the company, with a claim that he would follow the result. The online poll received 17.5m votes, with more than 57pc voting for him to resign.
In a follow up tweet today (21 December), Musk said he will step down as soon as he finds “someone foolish enough to take the job”. After this, he plans to run the software and servers teams.
While this tweet was a response to the poll, Musk may have already been planning to step down. In November, the billionaire told a Delaware judge that he planned to find somebody else to run Twitter “over time”.
Musk’s moves at the helm of Twitter have been causing problems for his other company Tesla, with its stock price dropping significantly.
A Wall Street analyst warned this week that recent actions, including the decision to suspend a host of journalists from the platform, damaged Tesla’s market sentiment.
It has been a controversial and chaotic period for Twitter since Musk completed his $44bn takeover in October. The new boss fired roughly half the company’s global workforce, before igniting a wave of resignations last month as staff refused to join “Twitter 2.0”.
A senior Irish executive at Twitter impacted by the cuts managed to secure a temporary court injunction to prevent her employment from being terminated in this way. Sinead McSweeney has since settled this High Court action.
Musk has also been working to change Twitter’s subscription service. After his takeover, he revealed plans to introduce a way for users to pay to get their account verified in order to “give power to the people”.
However, this caused a period of chaos as some users paid to get a verified blue tick and then changed their account names to impersonate notable figures or companies. One user impersonated pharma giant Eli Lilly and tweeted that insulin was “now free”.
The Twitter Blue subscription service was shut down as a result but returned this month with new features.
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Elon Musk. Image: Thomas Hawk via Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0)
