Twitter CEO Elon Musk announced on Tuesday he would step down following a poll in which a majority of votes said he should do so.
“I will resign as CEO as soon as I find someone foolish enough to take the job! After that, I will just run the software & servers teams,” he tweeted.
Musk on Sunday posted a poll to his account regarding his future as the head of the company.
“Should I step down as head of Twitter? I will abide by the results of this poll,” he wrote, adding in a second tweet he posted later, “As the saying goes, be careful what you wish, as you might get it.”
Earlier reports on Tuesday indicated that Musk is “actively” searching for a new CEO for Twitter after the poll. At the same time, Musk indicated before confirming that he would step down that he believed that the vote may have been rigged by bots.
In the poll results which were posted on Monday, 57 percent of voters, or 10 million votes, favored Musk stepping down just eight weeks after he took ownership of the company for $44 billion.
But polling company HarrisX on Tuesday tweeted out their own poll of Twitter users, in which 61 percent of respondents voted to keep Musk as CEO.
"Interesting. Suggest that maybe we might still have an itsy bitsy bot problem on Twitter..." Musk said in a response, according to AFP.
HarrisX said the findings "debunk" the vote on Twitter, adding that the poll was run independently of "Twitter or any Elon Musk related organizations."
Musk’s Sunday poll came hours after Twitter announced it would no longer allow users to promote their accounts on a host of social media platforms including Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, Post and Truth Social.
The move comes after users on Twitter started encouraging their followers to view their posts elsewhere, amid the sea of changes at the social media company.
The announcement was the latest in a series of controversial moves taken by Musk since he purchased Twitter in late October.
On the day the sale went final, he fired at least four top executives at the company.
Later, Twitter laid off half its workforce, with tweets by staff of the social media company saying the team responsible for human rights was among those affected. Days later, key security executives resigned from the platform.
Last week, Twitter suspended several high-profile journalists who have been covering the company and Musk.
Among the accounts suspended are those of Ryan Mac of The New York Times, Donie O'Sullivan of CNN, Drew Harwell of The Washington Post, Matt Binder of Mashable, Micah Lee of The Intercept, Steve Herman of Voice of America and independent journalists Aaron Rupar, Keith Olbermann and Tony Webster.
Musk indicated that the suspensions stemmed from the platform's new rules banning private jet trackers. He was responding to a tweet from Mike Solana, vice president of venture capital firm Founders Fund, who noted that the suspended accounts had posted links to jet trackers on other websites.
"Criticizing me all day long is totally fine, but doxxing my real-time location and endangering my family is not," he added in another tweet.
Later, however, Musk reinstated the suspended accounts after running a Twitter poll asking users whether those journalists should be reinstated.