Elon Musk to quit as Twitter CEO after finding his successor

Billionaire Elon Musk on Wednesday said he will resign as chief executive officer of Twitter as soon as he finds his replacement.

"I will resign as CEO as soon as I find someone foolish enough to take the job! After that, I will just run the software & servers teams," Musk wrote in a tweet.

This comes a day after the billionaire asked Twitter users in a poll on whether he should step down as head of Twitter. About 57.5% of users voted 'Yes'.

In a separate tweet, Musk alleged that the US government paid Twitter millions of dollars to censor information from the public.

Last week, Twitter suspended the accounts of roughly half a dozen journalists before restoring them later. This came a day after Twitter suspended an account that tracked Musk's private jet in real-time after a "stalker" mistakenly followed his son X, putting his safety at risk.

The account with the handle @ElonJet, owned by 20-year-old Jack Sweeney, had around half a million followers. Sweeney used publicly available flight-tracking data as and when Musk's jet took off and landed.

Following the incident, Musk also announced new rules for posting locations of the platform. He said any account doxxing real-time location info of anyone will be suspended since it could be a physical safety violation. But he said users could post delayed info on the platform. "Any account doxxing real-time location info of anyone will be suspended, as it is a physical safety violation. This includes posting links to sites with real-time location info. Posting locations someone travelled to on a slightly delayed basis isn’t a safety problem, so is ok," he tweeted.

Musk also deleted other accounts operated by Sweeney. As per the new Twitter policy, accounts tracking the private jets of other billionaires including Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates were also suspended.

Meanwhile, Bernard Arnault, the chairman and chief executive of luxury goods maker LVMH Moët Hennessy – Louis Vuitton, has pipped the Tesla CEO to become the world's richest person.

Musk, who bought microblogging platform Twitter for $44 billion, saw his fortune dip by over $100 billion in 2022 as shares of electric vehicle giant Tesla tumbled 60% since January this year.

The Tesla CEO's net worth fell to $148 billion on Wednesday, following a selloff in the electric carmaker's stock.

In comparison, Arnault's net worth stood at $161 billion. The 73-year-old French business magnate owns 48% in fashion giant LVMH. His company owns luxury brands like Christian Dior, Fendi, Bulgari, Tiffany & Co. and champagne maker Moet & Chandon.