Elon Musk has put his role as head of Twitter as much as a vote, and the people have spoken: He should step down because the leader of the social media platform he owns.
It comes after pressure from Tesla investors, who feel abandoned.
As we reported over the previous couple of weeks, Tesla investors have develop into more vocal about their dissatisfaction with their CEO, Elon Musk, spending plenty of time on Twitter and selling Tesla shares to support the corporate.
On top of it, many see him becoming more political through his own use and leadership of Twitter and imagine that the trend is affecting Tesla as many automobile buyers have difficulties separating Tesla and Musk.
Tesla investors have been calling for Musk to step down from the role of CEO at Twitter and refocus on Tesla, but Musk has mostly ignored their pleas.
It reached a level where investors were beginning to now call for Musk to step down from his role as CEO of Tesla as an alternative.
Leo KoGuan, the third largest Tesla investor, told Electrek last week:
The purpose of no return, Elon has moved on permanently I feel from Elon the engineer par-excellent to Elon the supreme political king-maker. Based on this assumption, only based on this assumption, Elon should find his own successor approved by independent BOD members. After all, BOD should arrange an independent search committee to seek out a brand new CEO.
Following a couple of more mistakes over the previous couple of days, like suspending journalists and banning sharing links to other social media, each moves that were later a minimum of partly reverted, Musk’s own leadership of Twitter has come into query as well.
Stuck between the 2, Musk took to Twitter yesterday with a poll to ask whether he should remain the pinnacle of Twitter:
The CEO says that he’ll abide by the results of the poll – something he has done up to now over other matters.
Over 17 million people voted and a somewhat strong majority (57%) voted in favor of him stepping down. That’s impressive considering Musk has a block list stopping people he dislikes from seeing or voting on this poll and the poll went out to his own followers.
Musk doesn’t appear to have a transparent successor to guide Twitter – though he tweeted with Lex Fridman, an AI engineer and podcaster, about potentially taking on.
Tesla’s stock (TSLA) was up by as much as 5% in pre-market trading following news of the poll.
Electrek’s Take
Let’s see what he means by “stepping down” here. He still owns the corporate and it’s private. So far as we all know, there’s no board in place yet nor a transparent structure to seek out a substitute.
Due to this fact, I don’t think finding another person to guide the day-to-day will resolve all the problems for Tesla shareholders, however it would definitely liberate more time for the CEO to spend on the corporate.
Nevertheless, the loss in credibility that he suffered through those Twitter antics is more likely to have an enduring impact on each Tesla and Twitter.
As for the latter, if Musk truly wants it to be a platform at no cost speech that serves the middle relatively than the extremes of each political sides, Twitter might be higher off with someone more apolitical than himself.
Fridman could potentially be option in my view. He does seem less political and more level-headed than Musk.
Either way, I hope that this implies I can soon stop reporting on this Twitter nonsense and give attention to more fun stuff again.
What do you think that? Tell us within the comments section below.