Elon Musk before resignation: Twitter users vote against him as company boss

Created: 2022-12-20 05:18

By: Lisa Mayerhofer

In a Twitter poll he created himself, the majority voted for the resignation of CEO Elon Musk.

He had previously stated that he wanted to stick to the result.

San Francisco – As bizarre and chaotic as his takeover of the short message service Twitter was, his farewell seems just as strange: Tech billionaire Elon Musk is about to resign as CEO of Twitter, but as the majority owner he will continue to have an influence on the world's most important short message service .

In a Twitter poll initiated by the 51-year-old himself, the majority on Monday spoke in favor of this step.

Of the 17.5 million votes cast, 57.5 percent were in favor of resignation and 42.5 percent against.

Musk had previously assured that he would stick to the result of the vote.

Chaos at Twitter after Elon Musk takeover

The 51-year-old Tesla boss, together with other investors, took over the short message service in October for 44 billion US dollars and laid off a large part of the Twitter workforce in order to reduce the costs of the loss-making company.

There were concerns in parts of politics and civil society that the multi-billionaire could use the world's most important short message service according to his taste and negatively influence democratic opinion-forming, for example by hardly allowing any action to be taken against false information.

Other actions by the controversial entrepreneur also caused sharp criticism.

He recently blocked several US journalists' Twitter accounts, but later unblocked them.

Musk and his Twitter antics caused resentment

It's not the first poll Musk has had on Twitter.

Last year, for example, Musk committed a Twitter vote to selling a tenth of his Tesla shares.

In November, he had a vote on whether former US President Donald Trump could work on the short message service again.

Yes, he can, was the answer with a narrow majority, whereupon Twitter unblocked the account again.

His plan to no longer allow Twitter users to advertise their presence on certain competing platforms - including Facebook, Instagram or Mastodon - caused resentment.

Musk promised in another tweet on Monday night that major changes to the platform's guidelines would also be put to the vote in the future.

"I beg your pardon.

Will not happen again."

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My space

Musk has always presented himself as a champion of freedom of speech.

He finally propagated conspiracy theories on Twitter and used the platform to promote the US Republicans in his tweets.

The online service has developed into an important communication platform in recent years.

Governments, authorities and politicians all over the world use Twitter for their public relations work.

Musk neglects Tesla because of Twitter

Musk is also in charge at Tesla.

With the sale of shares in the electric car manufacturer, the entrepreneur managed the Twitter takeover.

The car company recently lost significantly in value on the stock exchange.

Three months ago, the share certificates were worth about twice as much as they are now.

This also shrank Musk's fortune and he is no longer considered the richest person in the world.

In the "Bloomberg Billionaires" and "Forbes" rankings, he recently ranked second behind the French entrepreneur Bernard Arnault from the luxury goods group LVMH.

Criticism of Musk came from ranks of Tesla investors – they called on him to devote more time to Tesla and to keep the carmaker on course.

Hargreaves Lansdown analyst Susanna Streeter said Monday that Musk's resignation as Twitter CEO could temporarily boost Tesla shares with a "shot of optimism."

This is coupled with the hope that Musk will finally give the automaker the attention it needs at a time of adversity such as falling demand in China.