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Elon Musk ‘Actively Looking’ For New Twitter CEO As He Suggests Poll May Have Been Rigged

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OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.


Twitter CEO Elon Musk has been “actively looking” for a new CEO to replace him as the head of the microblogging site as he claims his poll was rigged by bots.

“Musk is actively looking for a new CEO of Twitter,” CNBC reporter David Faber said. “As we’ve seen from his previous polls, oftentimes he actually already knows the answer before he asks people to participate in the poll, and that would appear to be the case here as well. Everything I have heard, he has been actively looking, asking, trying to figure out who the candidate pool might actually be.”

Musk, who owns the social media platform after acquiring it a couple of months ago for $44 billion, conducted a poll over the weekend asking if he should step down as CEO of Twitter. The final tally showed that 57.5 percent of the 17,502,391 votes wanted Musk to step down as CEO, while 42.5 percent did not. In tweeting the poll on Sunday, Musk said he would “abide by the results of this poll.” Musk has suggested that the poll was rigged by bots and said that only Twitter Blue subscribers, who pay $8 a month to have a blue checkmark next to their account homepage, will be allowed to vote in polls about Twitter policy changes going forward. Nonetheless, Musk had previously said he would not permanently be CEO.

“I frankly don’t want to be the CEO of any company,” Musk told a court last month in a trial related to Tesla, where Musk is also CEO.

Musk left some strong hints on Monday that he may not actually step down as CEO of the platform following a poll that suggested a majority of users want to see him go.

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“Should I step down as head of Twitter?” Musk asked in the now-completed survey. “I will abide by the results of this poll.” As of Monday morning, more than 17.5 million votes were cast, with 57.5 percent of respondents wanting him to step down as CEO compared to 42.5 percent who wanted him to remain.

Separately, Musk tweeted, “The question is not finding a CEO, the question is finding a CEO who can keep Twitter alive.”

But after other users made some points about who actually drove the results of the survey, Musk appeared to have a change of heart.

“Hey @elonmusk, it’s unwise to run a poll like this when you are now deep state enemy #1,” said Kim Dotcom on Twitter. “They have the biggest bot army on Twitter. They have 100k ‘analysts’ with 30-40 accounts all voting against you. Let’s clean up and then run this poll again. The majority has faith in you.

“I’m hoping that Elon did this poll as a honeypot to catch all the deep state bots,” he added. “The dataset for this poll will contain most of them. Some good data-mining and he could kill them all in one go.”

“Interesting,” Musk responded.

Meanwhile, another user suggested that only those with Twitter Blue checkmarks should be able to vote in polls since they are paying customers, so to speak.

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“Blue subscribers should be the only ones that can vote in policy related polls. We actually have skin in the game,” Unfiltered Boss said on Twitter.

Musk replied, “Good point. Twitter will make that change.”

The CEO question came amid a backlash against Musk and Twitter after the platform announced on Sunday “saying that it was going to ban users from being able to promote their other social media accounts on other platforms,” The Daily Wire reported.

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“Specifically, we will remove accounts created solely for the purpose of promoting other social platforms and content that contains links or usernames for the following platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, Truth Social, Tribel, Nostr and Post,” one of the now-deleted tweets said.

Musk eventually apologized: “Going forward, there will be a vote for major policy changes. My apologies. Won’t happen again.”

“We recognize that many of our users are active on other social media platforms. However, we will no longer allow free promotion of certain social media platforms on Twitter,” the company noted in a statement. “Specifically, we will remove accounts created solely for the purpose of promoting other social platforms and content that contains links or usernames for the following platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, Truth Social, Tribel, Nostr and Post.”

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