- Elon Musk ran a poll asking Twitter users whether he should quit as CEO, and the majority said yes.
- Musk said he will resign when he found "someone foolish enough to take the job."
The people of Twitter have spoken, and they want Elon Musk out.
For those trying to tune out the billionaire CEO's latest antics, Musk ran a poll Sunday night asking Twitter users whether he should step down as the head of the social-media company. The survey drew 17.5 million votes — which is more than the average US viewership of the World Cup Final, which weighed in around 16.8 million.
The majority of voters, 57.5%, said that Musk should go. Musk, who said that he'd abide by the results of the poll, finally broke his silence on Tuesday saying that he would resign as Twitter's chief executive when he found "someone foolish enough to take the job."
Speculation about the referendum has been rampant — why on earth did he run the poll, will he, in fact, leave? and who will take over Twitter?— but the fact is Musk knew what the results would be, and he intends to use the vote as a justification for a decision he made long ago.
By posing the stay-or-go question in an online poll, Musk portrayed himself as a magnanimous chief who listens to his constituents. In reality, he's spinning a narrative about his forthcoming resignation to suit his desires to return to Tesla.
"Given all the flak he's gotten over the past few months for how he's handling Twitter, it was pretty obvious he was going to get a negative vote," Peter Bamberger, a professor at Tel Aviv University's Coller School of Management, told Insider. "Now he can gain a sense of legitimacy in terms of stepping down, while also creating an image that he's a democratic leader — and maximize his personal wealth, too."
An egalitarian and community-minded leader who does what he wants
Many companies use online polls and social-media surveys to build engagement with customers and gather market intelligence, however imperfect that market data might be.
Musk also likes using polls. Some cases in point: Should he sell more Tesla stock? Should Donald Trump be allowed back on the platform? And should Twitter offer a general amnesty to suspended accounts?
But Musk doesn't conduct polls to engage or to inform. Rather, it's to rationalize his plans and point of view.
"He doesn't seem impulsive," Bamberger said. "He runs his polls selectively, and he does them when he knows what the outcome will be."
In other words, by allowing Twitter users to ostensibly make decisions for him via unorthodox means, he can frame his leadership as egalitarian and community-minded, while doing whatever he wants. And what he wants is to resign as the CEO of Twitter.
This shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone. In May, Musk told investors he'd serve as a temporary CEO of Twitter for a few months after he completed his $44 billion takeover. During his first meeting with Twitter employees in June, Musk said he didn't care about being the company's CEO. He reiterated that sentiment in November, saying, "I expect to reduce my time at Twitter and find somebody else to run Twitter over time."
Leaving Twitter would seem a savvy business move for Musk. His leadership of Twitter is viewed as a disaster in many circles, and even many Musk loyalists want him to go. They see his stint as the head of the social-media platform as a distraction from Tesla. Investors appear to agree: The value of Tesla has plummeted since Musk bought Twitter.
Of course, it's plausible that a tiny part of Musk thought the poll would have turned out differently. Maybe he thought users would beg him to stay on as CEO for life.
"I am not in his mind," Ariane Ollier-Malaterre, a professor at the School of Management at the Université du Québec à Montréal, said, "but I don't see how people voting on you leaving makes you look good."
A version of this story originally published on December 20, 2022.