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Elon Musk (in November 2019 in California)
Photo: Frederic J. Brown / AFP
Elon Musk has announced that he will give up his post as CEO once he has found a successor.
"I will resign as CEO as soon as I find someone stupid enough to take the job," he wrote on Wednesday night on his social network account.
After that, he will "only manage the software and server teams."
Musk was responding to a user survey he initiated, which ended after twelve hours on Monday morning.
The entrepreneur had asked: "Should I resign as CEO of Twitter?" Musk had promised that he would stick to the results of the survey.
A total of about 17.5 million Twitter accounts took part in the survey - and about 57.5 percent of them supported Musk's stepping down as CEO.
The departure does not come as a surprise
Musk had already made it clear a few weeks ago that he didn't want to stay in Twitter's top post himself permanently.
"After the takeover, there will be an initial surge in activities to restructure the company," he said at a court hearing in the US state of Delaware.
"But then I expect to cut back on my time on Twitter."
The 51-year-old took over the short message service in cooperation with other investors for 44 billion dollars in October and laid off a large part of the workforce in order to reduce the costs of the loss-making company.
Musk also sold Tesla shares to take over Twitter.
The electric car company, where Musk is also CEO, had recently lost significantly in value on the stock exchange.
From the ranks of Tesla investors, there has always been criticism of Musk's involvement on Twitter - they called on him to devote more time to Tesla and to keep the carmaker on course.
Hargreaves Landsdown analyst Susannah Streeter said on Monday that Musk's resignation as Twitter CEO could temporarily boost Tesla shares with a "shot of optimism."
aar/dpa/Reuters
