Elon Musk breaks his silence after 10 million Twitter users voted for him to step down | Elon Musk
Elon Musk has tweeted for the first time since more than 10 million people voted for him to step down as Twitter’s CEO, saying that only paid Twitter Blue subscribers will be able to vote in future policy-related polls.
On Sunday, Musk asked Twitter users if he should step down as head of the company, promising to follow the results of his poll. When the poll closed on Monday, 57.5% said he should resign.
Normally a prolific user of the platform, Musk did not tweet in the immediate hours after the vote. His silence was finally broken when he responded with “interesting”[ads1]; to several suggestions that the poll results were skewed by fake accounts.
Responding to another user’s suggestion that “Blue subscribers should be the only ones able to vote in policy-related polls”, Musk said: “Good point. Twitter will make that change.”
Twitter Blue is a paid subscription that allows anyone to purchase a blue badge for their account.
As the majority owner of the privately held company, no one can force Musk out, but a series of confusing decisions in recent days has caused even some of his closest supporters to cut ties with him.
A decision to ban an account that tracked the location of his private jet last week was followed by a mass suspension of critical journalists who reported on the ban. That in turn led to an exodus of some committed users to other social networks, mainly its decentralized competitor Mastodon, whose own account was banned for posting a link to the jet tracker’s account on the rival platform.
On Sunday, Musk responded by banning all links to other social networks, including Mastodon, Instagram, Facebook, and even smaller platforms like Nostr, used by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, and Linktree, a website creation tool favored by influencers.
That ban was lifted by the end of the day, following a Twitter poll by the Twitter Safety account, with Musk says: “Going forward, major political changes will be voted on. I’m sorry. Won’t happen again.”
Musk has a history of using Twitter polls to rubber-stamp big decisions, selling a tenth of his Tesla shares after a poll in 2021restore Donald Trump’s account after a second last month and reinstate a number of suspended accounts after a third. “Vox Populi, Vox Dei,” Musk tweeted after the Trump poll.
However, in many cases he has given the impression of having already decided the outcome before the post: he had already announced a sale of Tesla stock, for example, long before he put it to a vote, and his plan to reinstate Trump had been discussed since before he bought Twitter.
The idea of stepping down as CEO had also been hinted at long before the Twitter poll was published. On November 16, he told a judge in Delaware that he planned to reduce his time on Twitter and “find someone else to run Twitter over time”.
PA contributed to this report
