Elon Musk Just Started A Poll Asking Whether He Should Step Down As Head Of Twitter

Elon Musk just did the unthinkable.

He left his future at Twitter in the hands of his followers (and the rest of us).

A new Twitter poll asks whether he should step down as the head of Twitter. The polls closed at 57.5% in favor of “yes,” he should step down and 42.5% saying “no,” he shouldn’t step down. Here’s the poll:

Handing over the decision to the masses is a bold move.

Musk said in the poll that he will abide by the decision of the voters. For most of us following his antics at Twitter over the last few weeks, this is one of the strangest and wildest moves he has ever made, since he is suggesting he would actually step aside from running the company if we all vote for him to do that.

It’s also a sign of a massive ego.

Regardless of how this turns out, asking people to keep him “in office” and saying he will agree to whatever happens means he must be extremely confident.

Or it is all a bluff.

We also don’t know if he can tweak the outcome and even change the voting, since we don’t have access to any of the mechanics and this is not an official election.

I also wonder how this is possible given the fact that Twitter and Elon Musk must have some accountability to investors and those who work at the social media firm.

Musk knows his followers will come to his rescue. Maybe. In the last few minutes writing this column, the vote had swung wildly against him after it had been in favor of him staying on. A few minutes after it was about 50-50, the voting was at 52% in favor of him stepping down when there were a million votes. By Monday afternoon, there were more than 17.5 million final votes and 57.5% wanted him out.

What this means is that the pro-Elon Musk crowd probably noticed his tweet right away, and the poll was making its way out to the masses (meaning, outside of his 122 million followers). Then people outside of his followers started voting. It’s easy to forget that Musk has almost half the number of followers that are even using Twitter.

I’ve never seen anything like this before.

Musk seems to come up with ideas in the spur of the moment, likely from a luxury suite in Qatar where he watched the World Cup. Maybe he asked people traveling with him if he should conduct the poll and they all told him it was a smart move. Maybe he is by himself.

Either way, it’s ridiculous to run a poll about his own position.

Here’s what we do know:

Musk would have a hard time letting Twitter fall into the hands of anyone else, considering he still owns the company. He might hire a frontman or frontwoman who just does what he says but accepts all of the blame when things go south.

Actually letting someone else run the show? It would be like Henry Ford agreeing to let someone else run the automaker in the early days. Or Steve Jobs in his prime at Apple AAPL . Or President Trump allowing someone else to lead while he was President of the United States. In other words, unlikely.

Even if Musk did step down, he would likely still run the company from behind the curtain. Or was he hacked? Playing joke?

I’ll post an update in the morning after the poll ends in about 11 hours from now. Right now, the “yes he should step down” votes are running about 54% with 1,300,000 votes.

Fascinating stuff.