After nearly two days of procrastination, the entrepreneur accepted the verdict of the poll he launched on his social network on Sunday.

Some 57% of the 17 million participating users have demanded his departure.

“I will resign from the general management as soon as I find someone crazy enough to do this job!”, tweeted the iconoclastic fifty-year-old.

Elon Musk has never yet, of his own free will, ceded the reins of one of the many major companies he has created or taken over the past three decades.

Landed from his own company X.com by the board of directors in 2000, he is still today at the head, in addition to Twitter, of Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink and The Boring Company.

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a Yale University professor and governance specialist, compares him to Travis Kalanick (Uber), Adam Neumann (WeWork), even Steve Jobs "before he took a kick in the ass" and was fired from Apple in 1985.

Leaders, according to him, become "withdrawn", unable to "listen", "rejecting what could help them".

For Ann Lipton, professor of business law and entrepreneurship at Tulane University, even if Elon Musk appoints a successor, "he has very strong opinions on how to run Twitter", of which he will remain the majority shareholder.

“So any new boss might struggle to implement their own vision,” she says.

“He will likely work in Musk's shadow, especially since Musk wants to stay with the company.”

The native of Pretoria thus indicated that even once unearthed the rare pearl, he would still take care of “the teams dedicated to software and servers”.

The billionaire being a compulsive user of the platform, Ann Lipton imagines the possibility that he responds to direct requests from users asking him to decide certain questions and thus weakens his successor.

"A clone"

As for the profile of the future managing director, "he needs someone who reacts more wisely and diplomatically to outside looks", believes Jeffrey Sonnenfeld.

However, for the academic, the problem is that Elon Musk “is looking for a clone of himself and that is exactly what must be avoided”.

Several American media have mentioned the names of investor Jason Calacanis and former PayPal executive David Sacks, close to Elon Musk and, too, patented twittos.

They were part of the tight team that surrounded the billionaire during the takeover of the platform and intervened in key decisions, according to the Los Angeles Times.

For Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, rather than digging into his close guard, the second richest man in the world must seek an experienced leader, comfortable in the shoes of a public figure and with recognized intuitions.

He quotes the former boss of CNN, Jeff Zucker, as well as the ex-general manager of the telephone operator T-Mobile, John Legere.

The latter applied in mid-November, but Elon Musk immediately dismissed this proposal.

The successor will have to reassure the regulators, who are worried about less moderation of the contents, the advertisers, many of whom have distanced themselves, but also the creditors of the group, very indebted, as well as its employees.

Elon Musk himself admitted on Wednesday that he expects 2023 revenue to be down more than 40% from 2021.

He assures that thanks to the drastic saving measures taken since the end of October, in particular the dismissal of around half of the workforce, “Twitter will get out of it next year”.

"The value of Twitter is rapidly decreasing," warns Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, however.

"It's a highly perishable asset."

© 2022 AFP