Elon Musk tweeted for the first time since more than 10 million people voted to resign as Twitter CEO, saying only paid Twitter Blue subscribers will be able to vote in future policy-related polls.
On Sunday, Musk asked Twitter users whether he should step down as director of the company, promising to abide by the results of his survey. When the poll closed on Monday, 57.5% said he should resign.
Normally a prolific user of the platform, Musk did not tweet in the hours immediately following the survey. His silence was finally broken when he responded with “Interesting” to multiple suggestions that the poll results were skewed by fake accounts.
In response to another user’s suggestion that “blue subscribers should be the only ones who can vote in policy-related polls,” Musk said: “Good point. Twitter will make that change.”
Twitter Blue is a paid subscription that allows anyone to purchase a blue brand verified badge for their account.
As the majority owner of the private company, no one can force Musk out, but a series of baffling decisions in recent days has caused even some of his closest backers to cut ties with him.
The decision to ban an account that tracked the location of his private jet last week was followed by a massive suspension of critical journalists who reported on the ban. That in turn led to an exodus of some committed users to other social networks, primarily to its decentralized competitor Mastodon, whose own account was banned for posting a link to the plane tracker’s account on the rival platform.
On Sunday, Musk reacted by banning all links to other social networks, including Mastodon, Instagram, Facebook, and even minor platforms like Nostr, used by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, and Linktree, a homepage creation tool favored by influential people.
That ban was rescinded later in the day, following a Twitter poll from the Twitter Safety account, with musk saying: “In the future, there will be a vote for important policy changes. My apologies. It will not happen again.
Musk has a history of using Twitter polls to approve major decisions, selling a tenth of his Tesla stake. after a survey in 2021restoring Donald Trump’s account after a second last month and reinstate multiple suspended accounts after a third. “Vox Populi, Vox Dei,” Musk tweeted after the Trump poll.
Yet in many cases, he has given the impression that he decided the outcome before posting: he had already announced the sale of his Tesla stake, for example, long before he put it to a vote, and his plan to reinstate Trump. he had argued since before he even bought Twitter.
The idea of stepping down as CEO had also been hinted at long before the Twitter poll was published. November 16 told a Delaware judge that he planned to reduce his time on Twitter and “find someone else to run Twitter over time.”
PA contributed to this report
