First Look
Should Musk step down as Twitter chief? Users say yes.
Twitter CEO Elon Musk posted the results of a Twitter poll and of the 17.5 million users who responded, a majority said he should step down. Mr. Musk has been using controversial, unscientific polls to shape policies and chart the future of the company.
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More than half of the 17.5 million users who responded to a Twitter poll created by billionaire Elon Musk over whether he should step down as head of the company had voted yes by the time the poll closed Monday.
There was no immediate announcement from Twitter, or Mr. Musk, about whether that would happen, though Mr. Musk said that he would abide by the results. Mr. Musk attended the World Cup final on Sunday and may be midflight on his way back to the United States early Monday.
Mr. Musk has taken a number of unscientific polls on substantial issues facing the social media platform, including whether to reinstate journalists that he had suspended from Twitter, which was broadly criticized in and out of media circles.
Mr. Musk has clashed with some users on multiple fronts and on Sunday, he asked Twitter users to decide if he should remain in charge of the social media platform after acknowledging he made a mistake in launching new speech restrictions that banned mentions of rival social media websites on Twitter.
The results of the unscientific online survey, which lasted 12 hours, showed that 57.5% of those who voted wanted him to leave, while the remaining 42.5% wanted him to stay.
The latest poll followed yet another significant policy change since Mr. Musk acquired Twitter in October. Twitter had announced that users will no longer be able to link to Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon and other platforms the company described as “prohibited.”
That decision generated immediate blowback, including criticism from past defenders of Twitter’s new owner, that Mr. Musk promised not to make any more major policy changes without an online survey of users.
The action to block competitors was Mr. Musk’s latest attempt to crack down on certain speech after he shut down a Twitter account last week that was tracking the flights of his private jet.
The banned platforms included mainstream websites such as Facebook and Instagram, and upstart rivals Mastodon, Tribel, Nostr, Post and former President Donald Trump’s Truth Social. Twitter gave no explanation for why the blacklist included those seven websites but not others such as Parler, TikTok or LinkedIn.
A test case was the prominent venture capitalist Paul Graham, who in the past has praised Mr. Musk but on Sunday told his 1.5 million Twitter followers that this was the “last straw” and to find him on Mastodon. His Twitter account was promptly suspended, and soon after restored as Mr. Musk promised to reverse the policy implemented just hours earlier.
Policy decisions by Mr. Musk have divided users. He has advocated for free speech, but has suspended journalists and shut down a longstanding account that tracked the whereabouts of his jet, calling it a security risk.
But he has changed policies, and then changed them again, creating a sense of confusion on the platform about what is allowed, and what is not.
Mr. Musk permanently banned the @ElonJet account on Wednesday, then changed Twitter’s rules to prohibit the sharing of another person’s current location without their consent. He then took aim at journalists who were writing about the jet-tracking account, which can still be found on other social media sites, alleging that they were broadcasting “basically assassination coordinates.”
He used that to justify Twitter’s moves last week to suspend the accounts of numerous journalists who cover the social media platform and Mr. Musk, among them reporters working for The New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, Voice of America, and other publications. Many of those accounts were restored following an online poll by Mr. Musk.
Then, over the weekend, The Washington Post’s Taylor Lorenz became the latest journalist to be temporarily banned. She said she was suspended after posting a message on Twitter tagging Mr. Musk and requesting an interview.
Sally Buzbee, The Washington Post’s executive editor, called it an “arbitrary suspension of another Post journalist” that further undermined Mr. Musk’s promise to run Twitter as a platform dedicated to free speech.
“Again, the suspension occurred with no warning, process or explanation – this time as our reporter merely sought comment from Mr. Musk for a story,” Ms. Buzbee said. By midday Sunday, Lorenz’s account was restored, as was the tweet she thought had triggered her suspension.
Mr. Musk was questioned in court on Nov. 16 about how he splits his time between Tesla and his other companies, including SpaceX and Twitter. Mr. Musk had to testify in Delaware’s Court of Chancery over a shareholder’s challenge to Mr. Musk’s potentially $55 billion compensation plan as CEO of the electric car company.
Mr. Musk said he never intended to be CEO of Tesla, and that he didn’t want to be chief executive of any other companies either, preferring to see himself as an engineer instead. Mr. Musk also said he expected an organizational restructuring of Twitter to be completed in the next week or so. It’s been more than a month since he said that.
In public banter with Twitter followers Sunday, Mr. Musk expressed pessimism about the prospects for a new CEO, saying that person “must like pain a lot” to run a company that “has been in the fast lane to bankruptcy.”
“No one wants the job who can actually keep Twitter alive. There is no successor,” Mr. Musk tweeted.
