Elon Musk says he will resign as Twitter CEO when he finds a ‘foolish enough’ replacement

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Elon Musk said on Tuesday he will step down as chief executive of Twitter after finding 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 & servers teams,” Musk tweeted.

This is the first time Musk has mentioned leaving the role as chief of the social media platform, since Twitter users voted decisively in a poll for him to step down, which the billionaire launched on Sunday evening.

It is not the first time he has said he will not run the company in the long term. In November, the second-richest person in the world told a court in Delaware that he would reduce his time at Twitter and eventually find someone to run it in his place.

Calls on Wall Street for Musk to step down had been growing for weeks and recently even Tesla investors have questioned whether his focus on the social media platform is distracting him from properly steering the electric vehicle business.

Musk admitted in the Delaware court hearing he had too much on his plate. He said on Sunday, though, that there was no successor and that “no one wants the job who can actually keep Twitter alive”.

Prior to Tuesday’s tweet, Musk’s only response to the poll was to tweet claims that the results had been skewed by fake accounts. He also responded to a tweet suggesting only users who were paying US$8 or US$11 (for iOS subscribers) for a Twitter Blue subscription should be able to vote in the polls by saying that Twitter would “make that change.”

The poll calling for Musk to stand down followed a series of highly criticised decisions by Twitter’s new owner. He first banned an account that tracked the location of his private jet, and followed it up with a mass suspension of critical journalists who reported on the ban.

After users responded by announcing plans to leave to other platforms Musk implemented a new policy banning all links to other social networks, including Mastodon, Instagram and Facebook.

The change was made during the Fifa World Cup final in Qatar, where Musk was spotted in attendance with former US president Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner. By the end of the day, the policy had been abandoned, with Musk saying all major policy changes in the future would be decided by a vote.

Reuters contributed to this report