Elon Musk published a poll on Monday 19 December asking Twitter users if he should step down as head of the social media platform. Of the 17.5 million voters, 57.5% said that Musk should step down, leading the world's second-richest man to announce on Tuesday that he will step down as soon as he finds "someone foolish enough to take the job".
Musk became the sole owner of Twitter on 27 October, promising to prioritise freedom of speech but many users called out the hypocrisy of his assurances when the brash multi-billionaire suspended the Twitter accounts of several prominent journalists who had been critical of him.
Discomfort on the platform has grown since Musk's takeover which saw thousands of Twitter employees fired. His relationship with the company has been a saga of controversy and U-turns.
Not-so-free speech
After the results of the poll, which Musk assured he would abide by, he insinuated that the results were skewed by the participation of bots (automated Twitter accounts with no actual human interaction behind them).
Musk has often resorted to polls to make major decisions, such as when he un-suspended former US president Donald Trump from Twitter. He has now announced that any new polls moving forward will only be accessible to those who have paid the account verification fee of $8.
Despite the commotion, Musk finally responded to the poll by announcing that he will take his leave as head of the platform, and said that he will find a replacement "as soon as I have found someone crazy enough" to take on the role. Once the next head of Twitter is chosen, Musk will turn his focus on the software and server teams.
However, the question of Musk stepping down does not seem to be the result of a drunken tweet – US news channel CNBC reported that Musk had already been actively looking for a successor long before launching the poll. He had previously indicated that he would eventually want to hand over the day-to-day running of Twitter to someone else.
