After the takeover of Twitter in October 2022, Tesla boss Elon Musk ruled there for a while by voting. He asked users of the service whether former US President Trump should be allowed back there, whether journalists who had reported on his real-time whereabouts should remain blocked – and whether he himself should resign as Twitter CEO. Musk said he would stick to the result on the last point, and 57.5 percent of the participants were in favor of resigning. The Tesla boss wants to continue to fulfill this wish, as he has now said, but probably only towards the end of the year.
Musk feels needed on Twitter
Musk’s acquisition of Twitter negatively impacted Tesla, the company he’s been CEO of since 2008, in several ways, according to observers. First of all, this applies to the stock: Musk sold Tesla shares in the tens of billions for months, which he justified in some of these transactions with Twitter’s financial needs. In addition, according to polls, his Twitter decisions and statements tarnished his own image and that of Tesla. And there were also fears that the latest CEO job would leave him too little time for the electric car company.
That could have helped shape the result of the vote, and it actually helped the Tesla share, which was shaken at the end of 2022, at least in the short term. However, Musk remained at the helm on Twitter and is still at the helm to this day – in fact, he had declared that he would follow the user vote, but did not give a time frame for it. When asked in a video interview during the World Government Summit conference in Dubai, he now caught up on this: “Towards the end of the year” will probably be a good time to find someone else to lead Twitter.
That’s a shift, as the Tesla boss said shortly after the vote that he’d vacate the post as soon as he found someone stupid enough to take it. Several candidates had previously volunteered, but did not reach Musk. In addition, CNBC reported in December that even before the Twitter question, he had started to look for a concrete replacement and is still looking. But now Musk wants to stabilize the acquired company, make it financially healthy and define a clear product roadmap, as he said in Dubai.
Tesla boss wants an 80-hour week
The current workload from Twitter, which he has burdened himself with in addition to Tesla, SpaceX and Boring, was also discussed there again. Musk contradicted the proposal that he regularly works 20 hours a day – he described this as relatively rare, painful and not even helpful because he then managed less over the long period of time. He typically sleeps six hours a day, Musk said. According to his own statements, however, he actually works almost the entire time he is awake, from getting up to going to bed, mostly seven days a week.
In a recent lawsuit, he had expressed that as 120 hours a week. Musk didn’t say at the conference how much of that makes up Twitter, either, but did indicate that Tesla is taking him a lot less time than it used to: The company is no longer on the brink of survival like it was in good parts of 2017-2019 and can be operated with less effort. Twitter, on the other hand, requires a lot of work to get into a stable position, the four-time CEO explained. It should continue like this until the end of the year – but Musk doesn’t want to work “like crazy” forever either, as he said: “I would be happy with a work week of just 80 hours, that would be fine.”
