Elon Musk tweeted for the first time since more than 10 million people voted for him to step down as CEO of Twitter, saying that only paid Twitter Blue subscribers can vote in future polls related to politics.
Musk asked on Sunday Twitter Users whether he should step down as president of the company, promising to abide by the results of the survey. When polls closed on Monday, 57.5% said he should step down.
Usually a prolific user of the platform, Musk did not tweet in the hours immediately following the poll. His silence was finally broken when he responded with “interesting” to multiple suggestions that poll results had been misrepresented by fake accounts.
Responding 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 this change.”
Twitter Blue is a paid subscription that allows anyone to purchase a blue tick verification badge for their account.
As the majority owner of the privately held company, no one can force Musk out, but a series of baffling decisions over the past few days has caused even some of his closest supporters to cut him loose.
The decision to ban an account followed the location of his private jet last week Collective comment by critical journalists who reported the ban. This, in turn, led to the exodus of some of the participating users to other social networks, chief among them its decentralized competitor Mastodon, whose own account was banned for posting a link to the aircraft tracker’s account on the competing platform.
On Sunday, Musk responded by blocking all links to other social networks, including Mastodon, Instagram, Facebook, and even smaller platforms like Nostr, used by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, and Linktree, the homepage builder tool favored by influencers.
This ban was overturned by the end of the day, following a Twitter poll from the Twitter Safety account, with Musk says: “From now on, there will be a vote on major changes in policy. My apologies. It won’t happen again.”
Musk has a history of using Twitter polls to certify key decisions, selling a tenth of his Tesla holdings After one poll in 2021Donald Trump account recovery After the second last month and restore a number of suspended accounts after the third. “Vox Populi, Vox Dei,” Musk tweeted after Trump’s poll.
In many cases, however, he gave the impression that he had already decided on the outcome before publication: He had already announced the sale of his Tesla holdings, for example, long before it was put to a vote, and his plan to restore Trump to office. It’s been discussed since before he even bought Twitter.
The idea of stepping down as CEO was also hinted at long before the Twitter poll was published. On November 16, he he told a Delaware judge He planned to reduce his time on Twitter and “find someone else to run Twitter over time”.
The Palestinian Authority contributed to this report
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