Elon Musk is actively looking for someone to replace him as CEO of Twitter, CNBC reports.
The news comes after Musk posted a Twitter poll Sunday asking if he should step down as the head of the company. On Monday, when the poll closed, the majority of the 17.5 million votes cast said he should go. The tech boss had promised to “abide by the results” at the time he posted the yes-or-no poll, but he has yet to formally declare his intention to leave.
After buying the social media site for $44 billion in October, Musk said in court last month that he would only be Twitter’s CEO on a temporary basis. “I expect to reduce my time at Twitter and find somebody else to run Twitter over time,” he said.
ADVERTISEMENT
According to the unnamed sources cited in CNBC’s story about his search for a successor, Musk was allegedly looking for a new Twitter CEO before posting his poll over the weekend. The search is said to be ongoing.
But by his own account, the search to find someone to run the social media giant is challenging. “The question is not finding a CEO, the question is finding a CEO who can keep Twitter alive,” Musk tweeted on Sunday. “No one wants the job who can actually keep Twitter alive. There is no successor,” he wrote a day later.
He also replied to one offer to take the reins from him with: “You must like pain a lot. One catch: you have to invest your life savings in Twitter and it has been in the fast lane to bankruptcy since May. Still want the job?”
Despite his vow to honor the result of his poll, Musk later appeared to cast doubt on its legitimacy on Monday. After convicted fraudster Kim Dotcom claimed that the government has “the biggest bot army on Twitter” and said Musk should “clean up and then run this poll again,” Musk replied to the posts with the phrase: “Interesting.”
The Tesla boss also replied to another user who suggested that only users who actually pay $8 a month for Twitter Blue should be allowed to vote in “policy related polls.” “Good point,” Musk replied. “Twitter will make that change.”
Since posting his poll, feverish speculation has swirled about who Musk could name as the next CEO of Twitter. Some of the site’s users have floated a theory that Jared Kushner could be in the running after Donald Trump’s son-in-law was pictured alongside Musk at the soccer World Cup final in Qatar mere hours after Musk posted the poll.
Others have suggested long-time Musk loyalists like David Sacks, the technology investor who was involved in the early stages of PayPal, or Sriram Krishnan, who previously worked at Twitter as a senior product director and has since returned to help Musk remake Twitter in his own image.
Some people have just put themselves forward for the gig outright. Exiled NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden replied to one of Musk’s tweets about a potential successor with: “I take payment in Bitcoin.” And unlike Musk, Snoop Dogg turned out to be an extremely popular choice for Twitter CEO in his own Twitter poll. Of the 3.4 million votes cast in the rapper’s ballot, 81 percent said he should run Twitter.
