Is This the End of Elon Musk’s Twitter Odyssey?

On Sunday evening, Elon Musk pulled what might be his ultimate stunt as the owner of Twitter. “Should I step down as head of Twitter?” he tweeted. “I will abide by the results of this poll.” More than seventeen million people voted in the poll attached to his tweet; when the final results came in, 57.5 per cent had voted yes and 42.5 per cent no. Previously, Musk had employed a poll to decide whether he should allow Donald Trump back on the platform. (That vote was “yes,” too, though Trump has not returned to his reinstated account.) Now Musk had lost his own popularity contest. “I will resign as CEO as soon as I find someone foolish enough to take the job!,” he tweeted, on Tuesday. “After that, I will just run the software & servers teams.” The change was perhaps inevitable; in November, Musk announced that he did not “want to be the CEO of any company.” A number of people, including the podcaster and M.I.T. research scientist Lex Fridman and Snoop Dogg, have since nominated themselves for the C.E.O. position. (“Those who want power are the ones who least deserve it,” Musk tweeted, on Sunday night.)

At Tesla, Musk has styled himself the company’s “Technoking,” rather than its C.E.O.—a choice that self-consciously evokes his mercurial style of single-party decision-making. At Twitter, no matter what he tweets, Musk is liable to do anything he likes at any point. The poll came at the end of a week that might have marked the nadir of his Twitter tenure—a two-month span that has comprised a series of catastrophes. On Wednesday, the platform banned an account called @ElonJet, which tracked the location of a private plane associated with Musk. The official excuse for the ban was that the account violated newly established policy by “doxxing” Musk—revealing his location in real time. (In reality, the account only highlighted data that were already publicly available, and tracked the plane, not Musk himself.) Then, on Thursday, a series of high-profile journalists, including reporters from the Times, CNN, and the Washington Post, were banned from Twitter, most ostensibly for tweeting about @ElonJets. It was a betrayal of a significant set of Twitter’s power users, and a blatant contradiction of Musk’s own calls for protecting free speech. “Twitter’s increasing instability and volatility should be of incredible concern for everyone who uses Twitter,” a CNN spokesperson said. Finally, for a brief period over the weekend, Twitter prohibited users from posting links to accounts on other social platforms, such as Instagram and Mastodon, the open-source Twitter alternative.

Sunday’s public vote of no confidence must be a far cry from what Musk expected going into his acquisition. The company was seen as inefficient and moribund; theoretically, Musk could shake it up with his signature entrepreneurial bravado, while cheerleading Twitter as one of its most famous users. Silicon Valley investors leaped to participate in the deal, hoping that Musk could do with social networking what he’s done with electric cars and rockets. In reality, what followed was a chaotic and at times bizarre escapade in corporate dictatorship. Musk fired or laid off a majority of Twitter’s staff, perhaps going so far as to break European Union employment law, and personally trolled Yoel Roth, the company’s former head of safety, who was briefly seen as a Musk ally, after Roth resigned. On December 18th, Senator Elizabeth Warren wrote a letter to the chair of the board of Tesla questioning whether Musk might be illegally “appropriating resources from a publicly traded firm, Tesla, to benefit his own private company, Twitter.”

An electric-vehicle company might benefit from an auteur at the helm, but large social networks surely don’t. The sense of an individual hand at work, patrolling who can say what, has created a deeply alienating atmosphere on the platform. Social networks’ value often lies in maintaining a neutral background against which users can create their own experiences; on Twitter, that feels increasingly impossible. Whatever the topic of conversation—the war in Ukraine, Donald Trump’s reëlection campaign, the end of the World Cup—Musk’s presence is perceptible. The atmosphere has grown stifling; passengers are fomenting a mutiny against the captain.

In its early years, when it couldn’t handle its growing user base, Twitter’s error message, the “fail whale,” featured an illustration of a large sea creature borne aloft in a net held by small birds. Rehabilitating the platform has now become Musk’s white whale—an ambitious pursuit that has as good a chance of bringing him down as it has of succeeding. As the Twitter chaos has intensified, Tesla’s stock price has fallen, and there’s a growing perception among investors that Musk is focussing too much on the social network. (“Tesla has no working CEO,” Leo KoGuan, the car company’s third-largest known individual shareholder, tweeted recently.) According to reporting by Axios, some co-investors in the Twitter deal are feeling chagrined as well. Lack of confidence presents a profound problem for Musk, since his Tesla fortunes are propping up the Twitter acquisition. He has sold tranches of Tesla stock worth billions of dollars to pay for his portion of the purchase price—and yet this stock has tumbled since the Twitter acquisition, losing more than half its value compared with last year. Even one of the world’s richest people may not have access to the endless capital needed to turn a social network into a personal hobby.

The joy of Twitter used to be that you could find any kind of conversation there. It was like a digital version of London’s Hyde Park, with soapbox orators shouting about any conceivable subject. Politics, Hollywood, art, literary history, home cooking—the diversity was as appealing as the dynamism. Sprinkled in among hoi polloi were celebrities, brands, and pseudonymous trolls, all reaching their own various audiences. Now there is only one topic being debated, and one user who matters. If Musk follows through on the poll and steps down as C.E.O., he will have accepted that the platform can’t be defined by his ownership. He, too, has to be in the background.

The logical replacement for Musk as C.E.O. would seem to be just the kind of person he either laid off or alienated from the company: a staid expert who can reassure flighty advertisers and begin to reconstruct the business. Even if the executive drama calms down, there remains the issue of the thousands of departed employees; whole teams have vanished, and they doubtless made the product safer and smoother. Musk could remain Twitter’s mascot, inspiring zealots without performing the messy day-to-day work of running the company. After all, few users expect the Twitter experience to be perfect. We have already suffered through years of Jack Dorsey’s run as an absentee C.E.O., the proliferation of bot accounts, and lacklustre moderation policies. Mediocrity was a low bar, but, in a matter of months, Musk sunk under it. ♦