On Tuesday (Dec. 20), Elon Musk announced that will be resigning as the CEO of Twitter once he finds a replacement.
“I will resign as CEO as soon as I find someone foolish enough to take the job! After that, I will just run the software and servers teams,” he said in a tweet.
The announcement comes after Musk created a Twitter poll Sunday (Dec. 18) on whether he should step down as head of the social media company. Out of more then 17 million voters, 57.5 percent said the 51-year-old billionaire executive should resign. The other 42.5 percent said he shouldn’t. Musk recently received major backlash for Twitter’s abrupt suspension of journalists from top news organizations who cover him. These reporters include CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan, The New York Times’ Ryan Mac, The Washington Post’s Drew Harwell, independent journalist Aaron Rupar and more.
As previously reported by HOT 97, Musk purchased Twitter for $44 billion in April. “Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,” he said in a statement. “I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans. Twitter has tremendous potential — I look forward to working with the company and the community of users to unlock it,” Musk added.
Under his leadership, Twitter laid off a majority of its employees and former President Donald Trump was welcomed back on the platform following his suspension in the wake of the Jan. 6 Capitol riots. The social media platform also launched a paid verification feature that allowed “troll” accounts to impersonate major brands, athletes and public figures.