Elon Musk has tweeted for the first time since more than 10 million people voted for his resignation as Twitter CEO, saying that only paid Twitter Blue subscribers will be able to vote in future policy-related polls.
On Sunday, Musk asked Twitter users if he should step down as head of the company, vowing to abide by their poll results. 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 immediate hours after 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 allowed to vote on policy-related polls,” Musk said: “Good point. Twitter will make that change.”
Twitter Blue is a paid subscription that allows anyone to purchase a verified blue brand badge for their account.
As the majority owner of the private company, no one can force Musk out, but a series of puzzling decisions in recent days has caused even some of his closest aides 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 mass suspension of critical journalists who reported on the ban. This in turn led to an exodus of some engaged users to other social networks, primarily its decentralized competitor Mastodon, whose account was banned for posting a link to the jet 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 smaller platforms such as Nostr, used by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, and Linktree, a popular homepage-building tool by influencers
That ban was lifted later in the day, following a Twitter poll by the Safety Twitter account, with Musk saying: “Going forward, there will be a vote for major policy changes. My apologies. It won’t come back to pass”.
Musk has a history of using Twitter polls to mark major decisions, selling a tenth of his Tesla stake after a poll in 2021, restoring Donald Trump’s account after a second month passed and restoring a series of suspended accounts after one third. “Vox Populi, Vox Dei,” Musk tweeted after Trump’s poll.
However, in many cases he has given the impression that he had already decided the outcome before going public: 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. It had been discussed since before even buying Twitter.
The idea of stepping down as CEO had also been hinted at long before the Twitter poll was released. On Nov. 16, he 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