Elon Musk seemed destined to quit running the affairs of Twitter Monday after around 10 million users voted for him to step down less than two months after he bought the micro-blogging platform for $44 billion.
The Tesla mogul had polled users late Sunday, asking if he should “step down as head of Twitter” and vowing to “abide by the results of this poll.”
The voting ended with 57.5% choosing for him to leave on Monday.
With nearly 17.4 million voting in the online poll, that meant nearly 10 million users wanted to see Twitter no longer be run by Musk, who is once again the world’s richest man.
Musk did not immediately comment on the poll’s results.
Since buying Twitter and taking over as the Chief Executive Officer in late October, the billionaire owner of Tesla has been involved in a series of controversies on the ‘blue app.’
After buying the company for $44 billion from its former CEO, Jack Dorsey, Musk began to make some controversial changes to the company’s policy and personnel.
He sacked several of Twitter’s top executives and half of the company’s staff immediately after becoming its CEO, and announced a stop to remote working for the remaining, lucky employees.
He then gave the remaining staff an ultimatum that they needed to do “extremely hardcore” work or leave, an announcement that saw hundreds or so of the remaining staff quit the company.
The new CEO has fired employees who openly disagreed with his policies or tweets.
Musk went on to announce a new policy to commercialise the verification badge on the social media platform, a policy which raised dust among tweeps.
He first proposed a $20 monthly subscription fee for the blue badge, which he later slashed to $8.
He has frequently changed Twitter’s rules by executive fiat and with no prior notice and has banned tweeps who violated his new rules.
Recently, Musk disabled the Twitter Space feature from the app after having a heated argument with the host of a Twitter Space he participated in. The company, however, claimed that Space was disabled because of a little glitch. It has since been restored after backlashes from users.
In what seemed to be like a remorse for his unannounced policy changes, Musk tweeted Sunday night that every major policy change would now be subjected to a vote.
He wrote, “Going forward, there will be a vote for major policy changes. My apologies. Won’t happen again.”
