Elon Musk said on Tuesday that he will not step down as chief executive of the company until he can find a suitable replacement, citing the state of the company’s finances as a reason to delay his promised departure.
“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,” Musk tweeted, before joining a Twitter livestream to discuss the company’s situation with a former intern.
It was the first time Musk had mentioned leaving the role as chief of the social media platform since Twitter users voted decisively in a poll for him to step down, which the billionaire launched on Sunday evening. But the acknowledgement was far from a firm commitment to keep to his promise.
In the broadcast, Musk chatted with audience members about his experience at the company, and emphasised the necessity of cutting costs. Under his watch, Twitter is down to “a little over 2,000 people”, he said, having been facing a “negative cash flow situation of $3bn [£2.48bn] a year” until he arrived, describing the situation as “net dead”.
“That’s why I spent the last five weeks cutting costs like crazy,” he said, to ensure that Twitter would be “roughly cash flow breakeven” by 2023. Even now, running the company is as though “you’re in a plane heading to the ground at high speed with the engines on fire and the controls don’t work”.
Some of the company’s costs, he acknowledged, were a result of his own acquisition, which saddled the company with $12.5bn of debt that it has to pay out of its revenues. But “with the changes we are making here on massively reducing the burn rate, and building subscriber revenue, I now think that Twitter will, in fact, be OK next year.”
This week’s Twitter poll, sent in the wake of watching the World Cup final in Doha with Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, is not the first time Musk has said he will not run the company in the long term. In November, the second-richest person in the world told a court in Delaware he would reduce his time at Twitter and eventually find someone to run it in his place.
Calls on Wall Street for Musk to step down had been growing for weeks, and recently Tesla investors have questioned whether his focus on the social media platform is distracting him from properly steering the electric vehicle business.
Musk admitted in the court hearing that he had too much on his plate. He said on Sunday, though, that there was no successor and “no one wants the job who can actually keep Twitter alive”.
Prior to Tuesday’s tweet, Musk’s only response to the poll was to tweet claims that the results had been skewed by fake accounts. He also responded to a tweet suggesting only users who were paying $8 or $11 (for iOS subscribers) for a Twitter Blue subscription should be able to vote in the polls by saying Twitter would “make that change.”
The poll calling for him to stand down followed a series of highly criticised decisions by Twitter’s new owner. He first banned an account that tracked the location of his private jet, and followed it up with a mass suspension of critical journalists who reported on the ban.
After users responded by announcing plans to leave to other platforms, Musk implemented a new policy banning all links to other social networks, including Mastodon, Instagram and Facebook.
The change was made during the Fifa World Cup final in Qatar, where Musk was spotted in attendance with Kushner. By the end of the day, the policy had been abandoned, with Musk saying all major policy changes in the future would be decided by a vote.
Reuters contributed to this report.
