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進入《TAIPEI TIMES》Musk to resign as Twitter CEO
A phone screen displays a photograph of Twitter Inc CEO Elon Musk with the Twitter logo in the background in Washington on Oct. 4. Photo: AFP
NOT GOING AWAY: The billionaire is searching for a new CEO after losing a straw poll that asked whether he should quit, but is to retain control over engineering teams
Bloomberg
Elon Musk has confirmed he would step down as chief executive officer of Twitter Inc after finding a successor, but he plans to retain control over the company’s engineering teams.
Since taking over in October, Musk has overseen the firings or departures of about 5,000 of Twitter’s 7,500 employees. He has said he plans to emphasize Twitter’s engineering as owner, and it is hard to tell what is left of other operations, such as legal and finance, some of which have been gutted.
The billionaire executive embarked on a search for a new CEO after losing a straw poll he posted on the social media site that asked whether he should relinquish his role as head of the company, a person familiar with the search said.
More than 10 million votes, or 57.5 percent, were in favor of Musk stepping down, results that came in on Monday morning showed. Musk committed to abiding by the results when he launched the survey, but a day later he posted messages on Twitter more than a dozen times without directly addressing the outcome.
The search for a new CEO could be drawn out and not yield results quickly, the person said.
Musk has been almost single-handedly running Twitter since he bought it in October for US$44 billion.
He said early on that he did not plan to stay permanently as CEO and he has surrounded himself with a few trusted people, some of whom have suggested they would be ready to take on what Musk calls a thankless task.
“No one wants the job who can actually keep Twitter alive. There is no successor,” Musk wrote on Twitter earlier this week.
Among those who have remained in Musk’s inner circle are Jason Calacanis, an investor and podcaster, and former PayPal Holdings Inc executive David Sacks. The two were part of Musk’s war room in the days after the deal closed, and people familiar with the situation said they were given internal accounts and helped make decisions about who would keep their jobs.
Both have been making public suggestions for Twitter’s business strategy.
Calacanis has kept his ideas for monetizing Twitter coming and on Tuesday advocated for features including a “poll analytics” link where information on Twitter poll results would be broken down by voter attribute, such as country and number of Twitter followers.
Such insights are “well worth paying for,” he wrote on Twitter.
On Monday, he talked up Twitter’s new business branding efforts.
Sacks on Monday also retweeted a notification about Twitter Business, a new program that lets businesses identify their brands and key employees on Twitter.
He added the logo for Craft Ventures, the venture firm he runs, to the side of his name.
In a reference to Musk’s poll about whether he should stay on as Twitter’s CEO, Sacks suggested that other CEOs run the same type of poll.
CNBC’s David Faber reported earlier on Musk’s search for a new CEO. Faber reported that Musk’s search has been ongoing and started before the Twitter poll emerged.
Musk’s dramatic stunt, asking the public about his leadership capabilities, came shortly after he attended the FIFA World Cup final match in Qatar, triggering a wave of trending topics such as “VOTE YES” and “CEO of Twitter.”
Musk has warned that Twitter is at risk of bankruptcy and instituted a “hardcore” work environment for the remaining workers after a drastic cutback in staff.
In his less than two months at the helm, he has spooked advertisers, alienated Twitter’s most ardent creators and turned the service from a reflection of the news of the day into the main topic.
來源：TAIPEI TIMES
