A picture of recent Twitter owner Elon Musk is seen surrounded by Twitter logos on this photo illustration in Warsaw, Poland on 08 November, 2022.
STR | Nurphoto | Getty Images
On Sunday, Twitter’s recent owner and CEO Elon Musk posted a casual poll of users of the social media platform asking if he should step down as head of the corporate. By 4:50 a.m. ET 16.3 million votes had been solid, with the vast majority of respondents (57.5%) calling for the billionaire to go away his post.
Musk claimed he’ll abide by the outcomes of the poll, which is resulting from close early Monday morning, but it surely is unclear whether or not he’ll actually achieve this. Shares of Tesla rose 4.5% in U.S. premarket trading Monday.
In court in November, Musk said, “I expect to scale back my time at Twitter and find anyone else to run Twitter over time.” Nonetheless, on Sunday, he wrote in a tweet that there’s no possible successor for him on the social media company.
“The query just isn’t finding a CEO, the query is finding a CEO who can keep Twitter alive,” he wrote.
Twitter polls are straw polls, meaning they’re informal and never comparable to skilled public opinion research. Malicious bots or inauthentic accounts might also give you the chance to register a response to a Twitter poll.
Musk’s Sunday poll followed online backlash after the “Chief Twit” (as he has called himself) made sudden changes to policies impacting users of Twitter within the last week.
For instance, the corporate introduced a recent social media platform promotion policy on Sunday, which prohibited users from sharing links to a few of their other social media accounts. Longtime Musk friends and proponents, including Y Combinator founder Paul Graham, expressed their dismay on the policy causing Musk to later apologize and roll it back.
Days earlier, Twitter made changes to its policy on “doxxing,” which the corporate now defines as “sharing someone’s private information online without their permission.” The brand new policy prohibits users from sharing other people’s live location information, home addresses, contact information or physical location information but has left many confused over what information crosses Twitter’s line.
Musk’s policy changes were used as a justification to suspend the Twitter accounts of various U.S.-based journalists, commentators and others who were critical of the CEO or his corporations previously. Among the accounts were fully or partially restored a number of days later, but not all.
The suspensions marked the most recent chapter of Musk’s rocky takeover at Twitter. He led the acquisition of the corporate for around $44 billion in October, and his leadership has resulted in massive staff cuts, a spike in racist hate speech, advertisers fleeing or slashing their spending on the platform, in addition to the reinstatement of previously banned accounts.
Musk claims that Twitter usage has reached an all-time high since he took over, and hate speech impressions have fallen.
The billionaire’s management at Twitter is bleeding into, and raising concerns about, his other ventures.
For instance, Musk has sold billions of dollars value of Tesla shares this yr to finance the Twitter takeover. He has also pulled in talent from each Tesla and SpaceX, including executives, engineers and attorneys, to help him at Twitter.
Earlier this month, NASA administrator Bill Nelson asked SpaceX President and COO Gwynne Shotwell whether Musk’s “distraction” at Twitter might affect SpaceX’s work with the space agency, NBC News reported. Nelson said she reassured him it will not.
But Musk’s behavior at Twitter is having a negative impact on his automobile company’s public image and stock price. Shares in Tesla had dropped about 60% year-to-date as of Sunday night. It comes amid a broad decline in growth stocks which has seen the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite fall over 30% year-to-date.
In a note late Sunday, Dan Ives, managing director of equities at Wedbush Securities, wrote that the second-biggest request on his Christmas “wish list” was for Musk to search out a successor to run the social media company.
“With the Twitter chaos front and center and leading to a serious headache and overhang for the Tesla story, we imagine Musk needs to call a everlasting CEO of Twitter (and never Musk himself) to finish the pain,” Ives said.
Tesla’s largest retail shareholder, Leo Koguan, wrote in a tweet on Dec. 14, that “Elon abandoned Tesla and Tesla has no working CEO.” He called on the corporate’s board of directors to take motion. “Tesla needs and deserves to have [a] working full time CEO,” he wrote, criticizing the corporate’s board of directors for apparent inaction.
Musk tweeted last week that he’ll “be sure” Tesla shareholders profit from Twitter in the long run.
A survey in Germany’s Der Spiegel last week found that 63% of respondents feel that Elon Musk’s public performance because the CEO of Twitter has had a mostly negative or clearly negative impact on their view of Tesla.
And only 9% of respondents to that survey said they find Tesla very or mostly likable as a brand — the corporate ranked far behind VW, BMW, Opel and others in Germany. That is despite the indisputable fact that Tesla is investing heavily within the German market. It opened a serious vehicle assembly plant in Grünheide, outside of Berlin, in March this yr.
Correction: This text has been updated to reflect that at 3.30 a.m. ET the vast majority of poll respondents had voted for Musk to go away his post.