Elon Musk's Twitter poll says he should step down as CEO
The results are in — Twitter users have officially voted for CEO Elon Musk to step down from his post.
On Sunday, Musk tweeted out a poll: "Should I step down as head of Twitter? I will abide by the results of this poll."
After 17,502,391 votes, 57.5 percent of participants said Musk should resign from his role. The survey officially closed around 6:20 a.m. ET Monday morning, per NBC News. Musk had previously said he would eventually step down as CEO, as noted by The Verge's Alex Heath.
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The crude-but-consequential poll arrived after a particularly volatile few days at Twitter HQ — earlier last week, the platform suspended a number of journalists for supposedly doxxing Musk in real-time, though the journalists affected denied ever doing so. Their accounts were reinstated Saturday following backlash. Then, on Sunday, Twitter announced it would no longer allow users to share links to rival social media websites, only to seemingly reverse the policy decision hours later.
In response to speculation about Musk's reasons for posting the poll in the first place, which saw some theorizing that he had already chosen a replacement and wanted a reason to start the hand-off, the CEO said "there is no successor" and "no one wants the job who can actually keep Twitter alive." Others believe the poll could have something to do with the financial position of Musk's other company, Tesla; the electric carmaker's stock saw a premarket bump in the wake of Musk's poll.
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Brigid Kennedy worked at The Week from 2021 to 2023 as a staff writer, junior editor and then story editor, with an interest in U.S. politics, the economy and the music industry.
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