The CEO of Twitter, Elon Musk, announced Tuesday that he would be stepping down from his role at the company.
The announcement follows Musk’s Twitter poll from earlier this week, asking users if he should “step down as head of Twitter.” When the poll was published, Musk wrote, “I will abide by the results of this poll.”
During the 12-hour poll, there were 17,502,391 votes. A majority of 57.5% of users thought Musk should step down, while 42.5% voted “no.”
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
Tuesday night, Musk provided an update on the matter, stating that he will step down once he finds someone else to run Twitter. This will allow him to focus on the company’s software and hardware.
“I will resign as CEO as soon as I find someone foolish enough to take the job!” he tweeted. “After that, I will just run the software & servers teams.”
During the World Cup on Sunday, Musk faced backlash after the company issued a statement stating that it would ban users from promoting their other social media accounts on other platforms.
“Going forward, there will be a vote for major policy changes,” Musk tweeted. “My apologies. Won’t happen again.”
The policy was announced in a blog post during the World Cup, which indicates the company knew it wouldn’t be well received, so it tried to bury it.
“We recognize that many of our users are active on other social media platforms. However, we will no longer allow free promotion of certain social media platforms on Twitter,” the company said in a statement.
It said it would remove all free promotion of prohibited third-party social media platforms, such as using a handle without a URL. The above prohibitions also apply to bypassing restrictions on external links to banned social media platforms by using technical or non-technical methods that entail “URL cloaking” — spelling out the word for the special character in the URL.
The statement said that cross-posting from other platforms is not in violation of the policy, including from the listed sites. The company said that it would allow people to pay to promote their social media accounts on other platforms.
