SAN FRANCISO, United States – Elon Musk on Tuesday said that he doubted the reliability of a Twitter poll in which a majority of votes said he should step down as a CEO of the company.
Musk, who became sole owner of the platform on Oct 27, said earlier he would abide by the poll results but in a series of tweets, the tycoon indicated his belief that the vote may have been rigged by bots.
In the poll results which were posted on Monday, 57 percent of voters, or 10 million votes, favored Musk stepping down just eight weeks after he took ownership of the company for $44 billion.
But polling company HarrisX on Tuesday tweeted out their own poll of Twitter users, in which 61 percent of respondents voted to keep Musk as CEO.
“Interesting. Suggest that maybe we might still have an itsy bitsy bot problem on Twitter…” Musk said in a response.
HarrisX said the findings “debunk” the vote on Twitter, adding that the poll was run independently of “Twitter or any Elon Musk related organizations.”
This came after Musk endorsed another tweet suggesting the Twitter poll had been overtaken by bots. He also said that any future polls would be limited to Twitter’s paying subscribers.
Musk has used the Twitter polls to take controversial decisions on the platform, including the reinstatement of the account of former US president Donald Trump and other suspended users.
The results of his latest poll on Monday briefly boosted the share price in his electric car company Tesla with investors hopeful that Musk would spend less time at Twitter.
CNBC and Bloomberg reported that Musk was carrying out a search for a new Twitter CEO, citing anonymous sources, but the Tesla and SpaceX owner ridiculed the report with a laughing emoji on Twitter.