Elon Musk lasts 7 weeks as “Chief Twit” before calling it quits

Seven weeks and five days after acquiring the platform for $44 billion, Twitter CEO Elon Musk promised his followers that he will step down from his position as soon as he finds a replacement.

“I will resign as CEO as soon as I find someone foolish enough to take the job!” Musk tweeted Tuesday night. “After that, I will just run the software & servers teams.”

The announcement from the “Chief Twit,” a self-assigned nickname, follows a poll Musk posted over the weekend asking users if he should “step down as head” of the company, in which 57.5 percent of the more than 17.5 million respondents answered “yes.”

“I will abide by the results of this poll,” the billionaire previously said.

Musk’s leadership style at Twitter has been a hotly contested topic among users since he acquired the platform in late October. Within the first week, he fired nearly half of the company’s employees, and several hundreds more resigned when Musk promised a “hardcore” work environment under his guidance.

Perhaps the most notable controversy under Musk, however, has come through the infamous “Twitter Files”—the release of internal company emails and other forms of communication in an effort to be more transparent about the platform’s past decisions on monitoring and censoring users who break its content rules. This week, “Part 7” of the files have put the focus back on Twitter’s role in censoring a 2020 article posted by the New York Post regarding Hunter Biden’s laptop, a full-circle moment to the first report released at the start of the month.

The resignation announcement was met with both applause and sorrow, as Musk’s transparency on the app has been praised by many conservative leaders. Mercedes Schlapp, senior fellow at the Conservative Political Action Committee, wrote in response to Musk, “Don’t resign. You are our only hope!”

Tom Fitton, president of the conservative foundation Judicial Watch, tweeted at the CEO, “As long as you don’t turn @Twitter back over to the FBI.”

Other users poked fun at Musk’s reliance on a poll to make the call a few days earlier, a tactic that he’s used to make other major decisions on the platform in the past few weeks. Some respondents pointed to a poll tweeted by award-winning rapper Snoop Dogg just a few hours after Musk’s poll on Sunday, where the artist asked if he should take over the platform.

It is unclear when Musk plans to step down from his position or if he has successors in mind at this time. Even by losing the title of CEO, however, he would still hold an important role in the company’s decisions while leading software development and servers teams, as Tuesday’s announcement indicates.

Newsweek has reached out to Twitter for comment.