Musk to resign as Twitter CEO to focus on engineering

Elon Musk confirmed he will step down as chief executive officer of Twitter Inc. after finding a successor, though he plans to retain control over the company’s engineering teams.

Since taking over in October, Musk has overseen the firings or departures of roughly 5,000 of Twitter’s 7,500 employees. He has said he plans to emphasise Twitter’s engineering as owner, and it is hard to tell what is left of other operations, such as legal and finance after the departures.

The billionaire executive embarked on a search for a new CEO, according to a person familiar with the search, after losing a straw poll he posted on the social media site that asked whether he should relinquish his role as head of the company.

More than 10 million votes, or 57.5%, were in favour of Musk stepping down, according to results that came in Monday morning. Musk committed to abide by the results when he launched the survey, but a day later he had tweeted more than a dozen times without directly addressing the outcome. The search for a new CEO could be drawn out and take time to yield results, said the person, who asked for anonymity discussing a private matter.

Musk has been almost single-handedly running Twitter since he bought it in October for $44 billion. He said early on that he did not plan to stay permanently as CEO, and he has surrounded himself with a few trusted people, some of whom have suggested they would be ready to take on what Musk calls a thankless task. “No one wants the job who can actually keep Twitter alive. There is no successor,” Musk tweeted earlier this week.

Musk also said during a Twitter Spaces hosted late Tuesday that the platform was on course to hit $3 billion of negative cash flow, prior to the recent round of severe cost-cutting.

In one of his first tweets after the closing of the survey, Musk said Twitter will restrict voting on major policy decisions to paying Twitter Blue subscribers. The service, which costs $8 a month, had attracted about 140,000 subscribers as of 15 November, the New York Times has reported.