Sunday night, December 18, Twitter users overwhelmingly voted to oust Elon Musk as Twitter CEO in a self-induced poll that the billionaire promised to uphold.
But after 57.5% of the 17,502,391 voters smashed the Get Lost button, some were wondering why the famously authoritarian technocrat would decide to step down from a position that seems to justify — for him at least — his spending $44 billion on the company in the first place. Pre-market trading proved — albeit in a small sample size — what tech insiders had posited: Tesla investors were pushing for the volatile Musk to log off.
On Monday morning, December 19, Tesla stock, hovering just above the $150 mark, finally ticked back up, after reports that major shareholders, like KoGuan Leo, were sick of Musk’s Twitter obsession. Shortly after, it fell below $150 for the first time in more than two years.
“Elon abandoned Tesla and Tesla has no working CEO. Tesla needs and deserves to have working full time CEO,” Leo tweeted last week. He is the third-largest (known) individual shareholder in the Austin-based electric car company.
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After Leo spoke up, other investors, like former national security professional Joe Cirincione stated their displeasure with the adverse effect that Musk has had on the price of Tesla stock.
“I’m a @Tesla investor and I want @elonmusk to get off @Twitter,” Cirincione wrote on Friday, December 16. “The value of my shares has been cut in half since he made his move to take over this platform. I love my Model 3, but he is killing the company with his antics.”
Once Musk took to Twitter to poll users about his position as CEO, pundits figured the obvious: that the Tesla board was behind Musk’s about-face, or simply that the Twitter CEO was watching his main company’s stock plummet.
Musk has yet to name a new CEO, and has not tweeted today regarding the results of the poll.