Elon Musk has suggested he might resign as Twitter CEO after the results of an online poll conducted by Musk himself on Monday morning indicated overwhelming support for his removal as the platform's leader.
In response to a direct question posed by Musk: "Should I step down as head of Twitter?" 57.5% of the poll's more than 17,500,00 respondents voted yes.
"As the saying goes, be careful what you wish [for], as you might get it," Musk tweeted after voting closed.
But despite his explicit avowal to "abide by" the survey's results, some of Musk's later tweets strongly suggest that his resignation will not be immediately forthcoming: "No one wants the job who can actually keep Twitter alive," he later tweeted. "There is no successor."
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Twitter has been engulfed in controversy ever since Musk's $44 billion acquisition of the platform two months ago. Among other things, the world's second-richest man has fired approximately half of Twitter's 7,500 staff (and then, in an unexplained reversal, asked several dozen to come back), introduced and then abruptly put on hold a new "blue-check" subscription service, permanently closed the company's Brussels office, and temporarily closed its office headquarters in San Francisco.
The chaos was compounded last week when Musk suspended several journalists' accounts — including those belonging to reporters for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and CNN — after he claimed they were "doxxing my real-time location and endangering my family."
Musk's move was vociferously denounced by the United Nations and across much of the political spectrum. The American Civil Liberties Union condemned the "purge" as "an attack on free expression" and called for Twitter to "reinstate the accounts immediately. In Europe, a senior EU official for the internal market Thierry Breton suggested that the bloc could introduce retaliatory sanctions against Twitter over its purge of journalists.
On Sunday, Musk was spotted sitting next to Jared Kushner, Donald Trump's son-in-law, at the World Cup final in Qatar.
