(Headline USA) Billionaire Elon Musk said Tuesday that he plans on remaining as Twitter’s CEO until he can find someone willing to replace him in the job.
Musk’s announcement came after millions of Twitter users asked him to step down in an unscientific poll the billionaire himself created and promised to abide by.
Considerable speculation has centered on the possibility that many of the accounts in question were “bot” accounts that were artificially created to manipulate public opinion by inflating certain viewpoints.
Regardless, Musk, who has been viciously savaged by leftist media and activists upset over his restoration of free speech, seemed open to stepping aside in due time once he has righted all the wrongs at the corrupt social-media platform.
“I will resign as CEO as soon as I find someone foolish enough to take the job!” Musk tweeted. “After that, I will just run the software & servers teams.”
Since taking over San Francisco-based Twitter in late October, Musk’s run as CEO has been marked by quickly issued rules and policies that have often been withdrawn or changed soon after being made public.
He has also alienated some investors in his electric vehicle company Tesla who are concerned that Twitter is taking too much of his attention.
Twitter appears to be flourishing since Musk’s takeover as conservatives who had long boycotted or been canceled by the platform seek to rejoin it. However, in his effort to expose the corrupt partisan actions at Twitter and to undo the damage—while still keeping the company financially viable—some of Musk’s actions have unnerved Twitter woke advertisers and turned off leftist users.
They include laying off half of Twitter’s workforce, letting go of censorious content moderators and disbanding a council of so-called trust and safety advisors that the company formed in 2016 to address hate speech, child exploitation, suicide, self-harm and other problems on the platform—but which ultimately allowed some 10 million views of child pornography while meddling in the 2020 presidential election.
Musk, who also helms the SpaceX rocket company, has previously acknowledged how difficult it will be to find someone to take over as Twitter CEO.
Bantering with Twitter followers last Sunday, he said that the person replacing him “must like pain a lot” to run a company that he said has been “in the fast lane to bankruptcy.”
“No one wants the job who can actually keep Twitter alive. There is no successor,” Musk tweeted.
As things stand, Musk would still retain overwhelming influence over platform as its owner. He fired the company’s board of directors soon after taking control.
Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press
