Twitter owner Elon Musk has not yet commented on when and to whom he intends to hand over the management of the company, which he himself has thrown into chaos. He had promised that. Instead, he sows doubts and restricts the promised right of Twitter users to have a say.
Elon Musk has tweeted more than a dozen times since millions of the network's users called for him to leave the Twitter post in a poll he initiated. The billionaire and owner of the ailing company said not a word about whether, how and to whom he would transfer the management. At the start of the survey, he had stated unequivocally that he would stick to the result.
Even if he hasn't responded directly to this result since then, Musk could not resist several indirect hints that he had imagined the course of the survey to be different. It therefore no longer seems as certain that he will comply with the wishes of the users as Musk had announced.
Among other things, he announced that only paying subscribers to the “Twitter Blue” program would be allowed to take part in future user surveys. The vast majority of Twitter users would thus be excluded from the decisions that Musk says will be more common in the future. He also responded with the word "interesting" to a tweet that suggested the resignation poll could have been manipulated by Musk's opponents with bots, automated Twitter accounts.
Obviously, Musk did not prepare for his departure. "There is no successor," he tweeted among others. And: "No one who could actually keep Twitter alive wants the job." What Musk plans to do with Twitter remains completely unclear. The suspicion expressed by some observers that the survey started on Monday is part of a well-considered plan to hand over the management of the company in view of the almost uncontrollable chaos that has been caused in the past few weeks is not correct.
According to Musk, Twitter is on the "fast track to bankruptcy". Advertisers are withdrawing and a significant number of users are outraged by the seemingly arbitrary blocks against Musk's critics, while the CEO himself repeatedly promotes right-wing conspiracy theories. A majority of the employees tasked with stopping the spread of hate speech and fake news have apparently been fired or left Twitter of their own accord in response to Musk's announcement of "hardcore" working conditions. The first hasty attempt to introduce a payment model with "Twitter Blue" failed in November. Another attempt has been running for a week now.
Musk's apparently almost exclusive preoccupation with Twitter also worries the shareholders of the car manufacturer Tesla, whose CEO and largest shareholder he is also. Like other car companies, Tesla is also suffering from the global economic downturn. Tesla shares have lost around 60 percent of their value this year alone. In a court case over Musk's record salary of around $58 billion at Tesla in November, he promised to take more care of the car company and reduce his time spent on Twitter. Analysts, apparently assuming that Musk would implement this after the resignation survey, had already spoken of a "sigh of relief" among Tesla shareholders because he could now take care of the carmaker's day-to-day business again. Apparently, Tesla investors will have to wait a little longer for this.
