CEO Elon Musk. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
CEO of Twitter Elon Musk has announced today that he will step down as CEO due to the results of an online poll.
On December 19 Musk posted the poll on his Twitter account and asked users, “should I step down as head of Twitter? I will abide by the results of this poll.”
On completion of the poll, over 17 million accounts voted, and the final verdict was 57.5% in favour of the controversial figure stepping down.
Musk announced today — days after the poll closed —that “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.”
In the past Musk has also said, “the question is not finding a CEO, the question is finding a CEO who can keep Twitter alive.”
However, MIT Research Scientist Lex Fridman told Musk that he would run twitter for “no salary. All in. Focus on great engineering and increasing the amount of love in the world.”
Musk replied saying, “you must like pain a lot. One catch: you have to invest your life savings in Twitter and it has been in the fast lane to bankruptcy since May. Still want the job?”
Currently, it is uncertain who Musk will deem “foolish enough” to be an appropriate replacement for him.
It is also important to note that this is happening while 100 former employees are launching legal action against Twitter, following the Musk takeover.
After Musk’s $44 billion acquisition from twitter approximately 3,700 employees were laid off.
A lawyer at the firm representing the workers Shannon Liss-Riordan says, “the conduct of Twitter since Mr Musk took over is incredibly egregious, and we will pursue every avenue to protect workers and extract from Twitter the compensation that is due to them.”
Three former twitter employees filed complaints with the US Labour board, claiming Musk had allegedly violated their labour rights.
This is not the first time Musk has been accused of breaking labour laws.
He has been accused by employees from Tesla and SpaceX for allegedly violating labour laws, by firing them unfairly.
