Elon Musk ran a poll on Sunday asking whether he should step down and the poll closed on Monday with the “yes” votes ahead.
As I reported earlier, this conflicted with the results of the scientific polls conducted by HarrisX and Harvard-Harris which showed both support for Musk and belief he was trying to better Twitter. The HarrisX poll showed that 61 percent said he should stay on as the head of Twitter.
Musk said that might indicate that the result of the Twitter poll was due to bots.
However, he had committed to stand by the results of the poll and on Tuesday, he confirmed that he would step down as the CEO, but with a little bit of a catch.
“I will resign as CEO as soon as I find someone foolish enough to take the job!” Musk tweeted. “After that, I will just run the software & servers team.” He tweeted on Sunday that there was “no successor” because “no one wants the job who can actually keep Twitter alive.” So it sounds like he was feeling out folks but hadn’t had luck yet.
According to CNBC’s David Faber, sources told him that Musk had been looking for a CEO since before the poll. As we’ve said, he always intended to put a CEO in charge which was why the left cheering and trying to bomb the poll was funny because having a different CEO didn’t mean that Musk was going away, just that he wasn’t going to be the day-to-day head of operations.
Fox Business is reporting that Musk is considering potential candidates from the so-called “PayPal Mafia” including tech investor Joe Lonsdale. However, Lonsdale seemed to downplay that speculation saying he hadn’t been contacted and had a lot of commitments.
He and Musk worked together at PayPal, the digital payment platform Musk helped create before he became head of Telsa, the world’s top electric car manufacturer. [….]
Lonsdale commented to Fox Business, saying, “Elon has not asked me so this was news to me – and although I’m very bullish on the possibilities at Twitter (and consider it very important to get right), I have other commitments I’ve made and other important mission-driven companies we have founded or backed taking up my focus at 8VC.” [….]
Lonsdale, for his part, was an early supporter of Musk’s initial bid to takeover Twitter even while it was being rebuffed by management. Court documents show he emailed Musk at the time supporting Musk’s intention to reign in the progressive bent of Twitter’s content moderation and described how he was meeting with top Republicans to plug Musk’s then-hostile takeover.
But it doesn’t sound like he has the person yet, so don’t count on him leaving immediately. Sounds like it’s going to take a while yet. This isn’t going to make those on the left happy.
