Elon Musk to Quit As Twitter CEO After Finding a ‘Foolish Enough’ Replacement

The Tesla CEO said that he would still run the software and server teams after his replacement is found.

Twitter’s new boss Elon Musk wants everyone to be verified on the platform as long as they pay for it.

(Photo: Pranay Dutta Roy/The Quint)

Billionaire Elon Musk, on Wednesday, 21 December, said that he will resign as Twitter’s chief executive officer only when he finds someone “foolish enough to take the job," adding that he will still run some key divisions of the social media platform

On Monday, Musk put up a Twitter poll which asked, “Should I step down as head of Twitter?” Musk added that he would “abide by the results of this poll.”

Out of a total 17,502,391 votes that were polled, 57.5 percent voted 'yes' to the new Twitter owner’s question, while 42.5 percent said 'no'. Musk said that he would still run the software and servers teams after his replacement is found.

Musk, who’s spent the last eight weeks running Twitter after buying the company for $44 billion, also said that he doubted the reliability of the poll and indicated his belief that the vote may have been rigged by bots. 

Polling company HarrisX tweeted out their own poll of Twitter users, which saw 61 percent of respondents vote for Musk to remain CEO. The company said that their findings “debunk” Musk’s vote, and added that their poll was run independently of “Twitter or any Elon Musk related organizations."

"Interesting. Suggest that maybe we might still have an itsy bitsy bot problem on Twitter..." he said in a response.

The Tesla CEO has not shied away from using Twitter polls to make controversial decisions, including the reinstatement of the account of former United States President Donald Trump and other suspended Twitter users. 

Meanwhile, Reports from CNBC and Bloomberg, citing anonymous sources, said that Musk had begun his search for a new Twitter CEO.  

However, Musk was quick to ridicule the report with a laughing emoji on Twitter.

BBC mentioned possible replacements for the post and named former Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, Sriram Krishanan, an engineer and confidant who’s helping Musk with Twitter, and former US presidential advisor and Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.