Elon Musk said he will resign from Twitter once he finds someone who is "foolish enough" to take over his post as CEO of the social media platform.
The founder of SpaceX and Tesla CEO concluded his acquisition of Twitter on October 27, 2022 after initiating it on April 14.
His takeover of the blue bird led many high-profile users to leave the platform after he laid off 3,700 Twitter employees and instituted an $8 monthly service fee for verified users to keep their blue checkmark identifier.
On Tuesday, in response to a poll in favor of seeing him stepping down as head of Twitter, Musk proclaimed:
“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.”
On December 18, Musk had asked users if he should resign, adding that he would "abide by the results of this poll."
The results showed that 57.5% out of the more than 17.5 million votes responded, "yes."
Twitter had some thoughts about the poll.
He did not specify if a CEO replacement being "foolish enough to take the job" applied to their willingness to pay $44 billion–which would cost his successor roughly $1 billion a year in interest payments while knowing that Twitter is a non-profitable business.
In a self-own maneuver, Musk asked users why he should keep his position and eventually suggested that only those who were foolish and greedy enough for power would want to take his spot as head of the company.
He tweeted:
“Those who want power are the ones who least deserve it."
When Twitter account Wall Street Silver insinuated Musk was lying about stepping down because he already designated a new Twitter CEO, Musk replied:
"No one wants the job who can actually keep Twitter alive. There is no successor."
It wasn't long until right-wingers who support Musk tried to persuade him with new poll ideas.
According to Daily Dot, a right-wing hacker by the legal name of Kim Dotcom tweeted without any evidence, the following.
“Hey @elonmusk, it’s unwise to run a poll like this when you are now deep state enemy #1."
"They have the biggest bot army on Twitter. They have 100k ‘analysts’ with 30-40 accounts all voting against you."
"Let’s clean up and then run this poll again. The majority has faith in you.”
The media outlet described the user as a man:
"Who has run all over the world to avoid prosecution for crimes including copyright infringement, money laundering, racketeering, and wire fraud."
He repeated a reference to the "deep state" in a follow-up tweet, saying:
"I’m hoping that Elon did this poll as a honeypot to catch all the deep state bots. The dataset for this poll will contain most of them. Some good data-mining and he could kill them all in one go."
Musk entertained the suggestion by responding, "interesting."
The latest in a succession of many eye-roll-inducing Twitter interactions from its CEO came after Musk threatened to suspend the accounts of journalists who he claimed were tracking his whereabouts, in spite of him revealing his real-time location of attending the World Cup 2022 final.
But just as he won't suspend his account for a penalty he impulsively instituted, it is unlikely Musk will be resigning from Twitter any time soon either.
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