It has been two unpredictable months of Elon Musk as Twitter’s CEO and now he said he will quit his job as the social media’s chief executive once he finds someone to take over the role.
In a tweet on Tuesday, he said, “I will resign as CEO as soon as I find someone foolish enough to take the job! After that, I will just run the software & servers teams.”
I will resign as CEO as soon as I find someone foolish enough to take the job! After that, I will just run the software & servers teams.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 21, 2022
Even if he relinquishes the throne, Musk will still have total control over Twitter, which he acquired in a debt-laden $44 billion deal. He had earlier as well talked about the same while exclaiming that he planned to eventually hire a full time CEO for Twitter.
In this regard, Musk had posted a Twitter poll on Sunday, asking, “Should I step down as head of Twitter?” and claiming he would “abide by the results.” The poll ended after 12 hours and the results showed 57.5% of votes in favor of Musk exiting as CEO.
Musk had made himself CEO of Twitter, his favorite social network that he accepted he was “overpaying for,” after firing former chief Parag Agrawal and other senior executives. Elon Musk also fired half of Twitter’s workforce, claiming a loss of $4 million per day, and shown the door to hundreds more after he demanded a promise from them of “extremely hardcore” working conditions.
As head of Twitter, Musk has made a various hasty decisions. There is no proof that any of them did this, but Musk claimed that it was because they “doxxed” him by posting his “exact real-time location, basically assassination coordinates,” which is why the company’s usage policies were changed on the spot and several journalists’ Twitter accounts were suspended. Some of the media had written about and disseminated links to @ElonJet, a bot account Musk had banned for broadcasting someone else’s real-time position without their consent. Musk’s private jet was followed using this account’s publicly accessible data.
He closed the Twitter deal on October 27, less than a week after that, he raised the price for Twitter Blue and added the facility of “verified” blue check-marks to subscribers. But that went heavy on the website as multiple fake accounts in the name of celebrities and corporations were made which also got the blue ticks. Twitter closed the subscription program, and launched it afresh last week with new protections to prevent fake accounts.
On Sunday, Twitter announced a new policy, which will suspend accounts promoting other platforms, like Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon and Trump’s Truth Social. Later in the day, the page on Twitter’s help site about the new “Promotion of Alternative Social Platforms Policy” was removed. Musk tweeted that the policy “will be adjusted to suspending accounts only when that account’s *primary* purpose is promotion of competitors, which essentially falls under the no-spam rule.” Musk made this new rule as a reason for suspending Washington Post tech columnist Taylor Lorenz’s account on Saturday, which was restored the next day. Musk had earlier claimed about Lorenz that her actions were “prior doxxing” and temporarily suspended her account, but she denied that on Twitter or anywhere else.
Both SpaceX and Tesla continue to be led by Musk. Due to the recent decrease in the value of his Tesla assets, he is now only slightly wealthier than luxury goods tycoon and CEO of LVMH Mot Hennessy Louis Vuitton Bernard Arnault.
