Elon Musk polled Twitter on whether he should step down as CEO. Most voters said yes
Twitter’s new owner and CEO, Elon Musk, posted an informal poll of the social media platform’s users Sunday asking if he should step down as head of the company.
At 6:20 a.m. ET on Monday, the poll ended with a majority of respondents (57.5%) calling for the billionaire to leave his post. More than 17 million users had voted by the time the poll closed.
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Musk claimed he would abide by the results of the poll. It is unclear whether or not he will actually do so. Shares of Tesla — another one of Musk’s companies — were up more than 1% early Monday.
In court in November, Musk said, “I expect to reduce my time at Twitter and find somebody else to run Twitter over time.” However, on Sunday, he wrote in a tweet that there is no possible successor for him at the social media company.
“The question is not finding a CEO, the question is finding a CEO who can keep Twitter alive,” he wrote.
In response to another user speculating that Musk has already chosen a successor, the billionaire said: “No one wants the job who can actually keep Twitter alive. There is no successor.”
This photo illustration taken on December 18, 2022 in Los Angeles shows a phone displaying Elon Musk’s Twitter page where he is conducting a survey about his future as the head of the company.
Chris Delmas | AFP | Getty Images
Twitter polls are straw polls, meaning they are informal and not comparable to professional public opinion research. Malicious bots or inauthentic accounts may also be able to register a response to a Twitter poll.
Musk’s Sunday poll followed online backlash after the “Chief Twit” (as he has called himself) made sudden changes to policies impacting users of Twitter in the last week.
For example, the company introduced a new social media platform promotion policy on Sunday, which prohibited users from sharing links to some of their other social media accounts. Longtime Musk friends and proponents, including Y Combinator founder Paul Graham, expressed their dismay at the policy causing Musk to later apologize and roll it back.
Days earlier, Twitter made changes to its policy on “doxxing,” which the company now defines as “sharing someone’s private information online without their permission.” The new policy prohibits users from sharing other people’s live location information, home addresses, contact information or physical location information but has left many confused over what information crosses Twitter’s line.
Musk’s policy changes were used as a justification to suspend the Twitter accounts of a number of U.S.-based journalists, commentators and others who were critical of the CEO or his companies in the past. Some of the accounts were fully or partially restored a few days later, but not all.
The suspensions marked the latest chapter of Musk’s rocky takeover of Twitter. He led the acquisition of the company for around $44 billion in October, and his leadership has resulted in massive staff cuts, a spike in racist hate speech, advertisers fleeing or slashing their spending on the platform, as well as the reinstatement of previously banned accounts.
Musk claims that Twitter usage has reached an all-time high since he took over, and that hate speech impressions have fallen.
The billionaire’s management of Twitter is bleeding into, and raising concerns about, his other ventures.
For example, Musk has sold billions of dollars worth of Tesla shares this year to finance the Twitter takeover. He has also pulled in talent from both Tesla and SpaceX, including executives, engineers and attorneys, to assist him at Twitter.
A CEO spending time and money on Twitter isn’t Tesla’s only challenge — the company is currently offering discounts on vehicles in China, an indication of weaker demand for its cars there, according to Tesla bear Toni Sacconaghi of Bernstein on CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” last week.
Earlier this month, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson asked SpaceX President and COO Gwynne Shotwell whether Musk’s “distraction” at Twitter might affect SpaceX’s work with the space agency, NBC News reported. Nelson said she reassured him it would not.
But Musk’s behavior at Twitter is having a negative impact on his car company’s public image and stock price. Shares in Tesla had dropped about 60% year to date as of Friday’s close. It comes amid a broad decline in growth stocks which has seen the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite fall more than 30% year to date.
In a note late Sunday, Dan Ives, managing director of equities at Wedbush Securities, wrote that the second-biggest request on his Christmas “wish list” was for Musk to find a successor to run the social media company.
“With the Twitter chaos front and center and resulting in a major headache and overhang for the Tesla story, we believe Musk needs to name a permanent CEO of Twitter (and not Musk himself) to end the pain,” Ives said.
Tesla’s largest retail shareholder, Leo Koguan, wrote in a tweet on Dec. 14, that “Elon abandoned Tesla and Tesla has no working CEO.” He called on the company’s board of directors to take action. “Tesla needs and deserves to have [a] working full time CEO,” he wrote, criticizing the board for apparent inaction.
Musk tweeted last week that he will “make sure” Tesla shareholders benefit from Twitter in the long term.
A survey in Germany’s Der Spiegel last week found that 63% of respondents feel that Musk’s public performance as CEO of Twitter has had a mostly negative or clearly negative impact on their view of Tesla.
And only 9% of respondents to that survey said they find Tesla very or mostly likable as a brand — the company ranked far behind VW, BMW, Opel and others in Germany. That’s despite the fact that Tesla is investing heavily in the German market. It opened a major vehicle assembly plant in Grünheide, outside of Berlin, in March o this year.
Correction: This article has been updated to reflect that at 3.30 a.m. ET the majority of poll respondents had voted for Musk to leave his post.
— CNBC’s Ryan Browne contributed to this report.
Chief executive officer of Google Sundar Pichai.
Marek Antoni Iwanczuk | Sopa Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images
Google on Friday made the latest a splash in the AI talent wars, announcing an agreement to bring in Varun Mohan, co-founder and CEO of artificial intelligence coding startup Windsurf.
As part of the deal, Google will also hire other senior Windsurf research and development employees. Google is not investing in Windsurf, but the search giant will take a nonexclusive license to certain Windsurf technology, according to a person familiar with the matter. Windsurf remains free to license its technology to others.
“We’re excited to welcome some top AI coding talent from Windsurf’s team to Google DeepMind to advance our work in agentic coding,” a Google spokesperson wrote in an email. “We’re excited to continue bringing the benefits of Gemini to software developers everywhere.”
The deal between Google and Windsurf comes after the AI coding startup had been in talks with OpenAI for a $3 billion acquisition deal, CNBC reported in April. OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The move ratchets up the talent war in AI particularly among prominent companies. Meta has made lucrative job offers to several employees at OpenAI in recent weeks. Most notably, the Facebook parent added Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang to lead its AI strategy as part of a $14.3 billion investment into his startup.
Douglas Chen, another Windsurf co-founder, will be among those joining Google in the deal, Jeff Wang, the startup’s new interim CEO and its head of business for the past two years, wrote in a post on X.
“Most of Windsurf’s world-class team will continue to build the Windsurf product with the goal of maximizing its impact in the enterprise,” Wang wrote.
Windsurf has become more popular this year as an option for so-called vibe coding, which is the process of using new age AI tools to write code. Developers and non-developers have embraced the concept, leading to more revenue for Windsurf and competitors, such as Cursor, which OpenAI also looked at buying. All the interest has led investors to assign higher valuations to the startups.
This isn’t the first time Google has hired select people out of a startup. It did the same with Character.AI last summer. Amazon and Microsoft have also absorbed AI talent in this fashion, with the Adept and Inflection deals, respectively.
Microsoft is pushing an agent mode in its Visual Studio Code editor for vibe coding. In April, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said AI is composing as much of 30% of his company’s code.
The Verge reported the Google-Windsurf deal earlier on Friday.
Technology
Nvidia’s Jensen Huang sells more than $36 million in stock, catches Warren Buffett in net worth
Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, holds a motherboard as he speaks during the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris, France, on June 11, 2025.
Gonzalo Fuentes | Reuters
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang unloaded roughly $36.4 million worth of stock in the leading artificial intelligence chipmaker, according to a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing.
The sale, which totals 225,000 shares, comes as part of Huang’s previously adopted plan in March to unload up to 6 million shares of Nvidia through the end of the year. He sold his first batch of stock from the agreement in June, equaling about $15 million.
Last year, the tech executive sold about $700 million worth of shares as part of a prearranged plan. Nvidia stock climbed about 1% Friday.
Huang’s net worth has skyrocketed as investors bet on Nvidia’s AI dominance and graphics processing units powering large language models.
The 62-year-old’s wealth has grown by more than a quarter, or about $29 billion, since the start of 2025 alone, based on Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index. His net worth last stood at $143 billion in the index, putting him neck-and-neck with Berkshire Hathaway‘s Warren Buffett at $144 billion.
Shortly after the market opened Friday, Fortune‘s analysis of net worth had Huang ahead of Buffett, with the Nvidia CEO at $143.7 billion and the Oracle of Omaha at $142.1 billion.
The company has also achieved its own notable milestones this year, as it prospers off the AI boom.
On Wednesday, the Santa Clara, California-based chipmaker became the first company to top a $4 trillion market capitalization, beating out both Microsoft and Apple. The chipmaker closed above that milestone Thursday as CNBC reported that the technology titan met with President Donald Trump.
Brooke Seawell, venture partner at New Enterprise Associates, sold about $24 million worth of Nvidia shares, according to an SEC filing. Seawell has been on the company’s board since 1997, according to the company.
Huang still holds more than 858 million shares of Nvidia, both directly and indirectly, in different partnerships and trusts.
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