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.
Technology
Tesla is hiring robotaxi test drivers in New York City, but company hasn’t applied for permits
A Tesla robotaxi drives on the street along South Congress Avenue in Austin, Texas, U.S., June 22, 2025.
Joel Angel Juarez | Reuters
Tesla is recruiting test drivers in New York to operate cars with “automated driving systems,” but the company hasn’t applied for the permits it would need to test autonomous vehicles in the nation’s largest city.
A job opening on Tesla’s website says the company is looking to hire vehicle operators in the borough of Queens. The hires will be “responsible for driving an engineering vehicle for extended periods, conducting dynamic audio and camera data collection for testing and training purposes.”
A spokesperson for the New York City Department of Transportation told CNBC on Monday that Tesla has not applied for approvals to test AVs on city streets in New York. InsideEVs, an electric vehicles news site, previously reported that Tesla was hiring test drivers for its robotaxis in Brooklyn.
Any company that obtains a permit to test AVs in New York has to keep “a trained safety driver behind the wheel, ready to take control of an AV-enabled vehicle at all times,” according to the DOT spokesperson.
Tesla didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Alphabet’s Waymo, the robotaxi leader in North America, has applied to test its AVs in New York, but its application remains under review, the DOT said Monday.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has been trying to sell investors on a future for his company that’s built around AI and robotics, rather than sales of its existing vehicles. But Tesla still earns almost all of its revenue from sales of EVs and battery energy storage systems.
Tesla’s EV sales have been on the decline this year, especially in Europe, partly due to Musk’s decision to focus on the Cybertruck, rather than producing a more affordable EV with mainstream appeal. Some of the company’s struggles are the result of a political backlash against Tesla because of Musk’s incendiary political rhetoric, work with President Donald Trump, and endorsements of Germany’s anti-immigrant AfD party.
Along with its recruiting efforts in Queens, Tesla is also seeking to hire test drivers for its Autopilot team to gather data from drives in cities and suburbs of Dallas, Houston, Tampa, Orlando and Miami, as well as Palo Alto, California, home to Tesla’s engineering headquarters.
The current listings on Tesla’s website say Autopilot vehicle operators may need to travel to international and domestic destinations and must be familiar with “automated driving systems,” suggesting planned or ongoing testing of Tesla’s robotaxi and FSD or Full Self Driving system, currently marketed as FSD Unsupervised in the U.S.
Tesla notched a win in Texas last week, obtaining a permit to run a ride-hailing service in the state. The Tesla Robotaxi LLC permit and state regulations do not require Tesla to keep a human safety driver on board.
However, Tesla has been operating a fleet of robotaxis in Austin since late June, with employees riding in the front passenger seat, tasked with manually intervening during a trip if necessary. The service has only been accessible to invited users. Musk said in a post on X over the weekend that he intends for the Austin service to open to the general public next month.
In San Francisco, Tesla is also operating a limited, manned car service but promoting it as “autonomous ride-hailing.”
Musk posted last week that the company is “working as quickly as possible to get 100+ Teslas operating for autonomous ride-hailing (can’t use the word “taxi” or “cab” in California) in the Bay Area and allow anyone to request a ride.”
The company is not authorized to carry passengers on public roads in autonomous vehicles in California, the California Public Utilities Commission told CNBC in a recent email.
Tesla’s approach to AVs has drawn federal probes, product liability lawsuits and recalls following injurious or damaging collisions that occurred while drivers were using the company’s Autopilot or FSD systems.
The California DMV previously sued Tesla, accusing it of false advertising around its driver assistance systems.
While Tesla owners manuals say the Autopilot and FSD features in their cars are “hands on” systems that require a driver ready to steer or brake at any time, Tesla and Musk have shared statements through the years saying that a Tesla can “drive itself.”
Technology
LinkedIn launches Mini Sudoku, pushing deeper into casual games that keep users coming back
Nikoli’s president, Yoshinao Anpuku, poses for a photo at Nikoli headquarters in Tokyo on March 19, 2025. LinkedIn worked with Nikoli and Sudoku champion Thomas Snyder to launch its Mini Sudoku game.
Nikoli
LinkedIn on Tuesday released a new game for the professional social networking app’s 1.2 billion users. It’s a miniature version of Sudoku, an old game with a rich history.
The new Mini Sudoku is LinkedIn’s sixth game. It’s scaled down from the traditional 9-by-9 grid and meant to be completed in two or three minutes.
“We don’t want to have a puzzle on LinkedIn that takes 20 minutes to solve, right?” said Lakshman Somasundaram, a senior director of product at the Microsoft subsidiary, in an interview with CNBC. “We’re not games for games’ sake.”
The introduction has the potential to strike a nostalgic chord and spark competition with colleagues, friends and family members for how fast the puzzle can be solved.
As with other puzzles in the app, Mini Sudoku gets harder as the days progress through the week.
LinkedIn added games last year to increase the fun and give users something new to talk about with one another.
Millions of people play LinkedIn’s games every day, a spokesperson said. The most popular time is 7 a.m. ET, and Gen Z is the top demographic. Of those who play today, 86% will return tomorrow, and 82% will be playing next week, the spokesperson said.
Launched in 2003 and acquired by Microsoft for $27 billion in 2016, LinkedIn remains in growth mode. Revenue increased about 9% to $4.6 billion in the latest quarter and membership reached 1.2 billion. Meta‘s social networks are more popular, with a combined 3.5 billion daily users and 22% revenue growth.
Unlike Meta, LinkedIn gives recruiters tools for finding candidates, and job seekers can apply for openings listed on the site. LinkedIn also now promotes a personalized feed of videos, similar to Google’s YouTube, TikTok and Meta’s own Facebook and Instagram.
Making the game
LinkedIn’s development of the game resulted from an encounter with Japanese publisher Nikoli, which popularized Sudoku.
Somasundaram and a band of LinkedIn associate product managers visited Nikoli’s Tokyo headquarters late last year and spoke through a translator about puzzles with the publisher’s employees. That led to weeks of meetings involving LinkedIn, Nikoli and Thomas Snyder, a three-time World Sudoku Championship winner who has helped LinkedIn with its gaming strategy.
The group hoped to make Sudoku more accessible, building several prototypes before landing on the board with six rows and six columns of squares.
“It’s very easy to just make a Sudoku grid,” Snyder said. “It’s very hard to make art in the form of Sudoku. And that’s what both Nikoli and we do.”
Snyder is founder and CEO of Grandmaster Puzzles, a publisher of Sudoku books. With a Ph.D. in chemistry, he goes by the nickname Dr. Sudoku and has contributed to the hint feature in LinkedIn’s Mini Sudoku and constructed some of the puzzles. With each day’s puzzle, there will be a video showing how Snyder solves it.
“I think it’s got the potential to be the largest of the games, just because it’s going to have a lot of brand awareness from moment one,” he said.
Sudoku’s history
Howard Garns, an architect from Indiana, came up with a game called “Number Place” that required people to fill in a grid with numbers from one to nine. No number can be repeated in a row or column, and all nine numbers must appear just once in each of the nine 3-by-3 grids that make up the puzzle.
Number Place debuted in the magazine Dell Pencil Puzzles & Word Games in 1979. It only took off after Nikoli included a spin on the puzzle in the October 1984 issue of Puzzle Communication Nikoli under the name “Suji wa dokushin ni kagiru,” which means “The numbers must be single,” a Nikoli spokesperson told CNBC in an email.
Readers abbreviated the puzzle’s name, calling it Sudoku.
At first, the publisher employed both the long name and the shorter Sudoku title in Puzzle Communication Nikoli. In 1992 Nikoli started using only the Sudoku name, the spokesperson said.
U.S. and European newspapers began publishing Sudoku puzzles in the mid-2000s. Sudoku joined The New York Times’ NYT Games app, which boasts 10 million daily users, in 2023. More than 100 media companies have licensed Nikoli’s Sudoku puzzles, the spokesperson said.
“The daily puzzles will only be available on LinkedIn each day, but we are looking forward to republishing selected puzzles from those in our magazine,” the spokesperson wrote.
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