Tesla stock rises as Twitter users vote Elon Musk off the island

If Elon Musk was looking for a quick way to temporarily lift Tesla stock out of its months-long doldrums, he may have found it. 

Shares of the electric vehicle company rose slightly in pre-market trading on Monday after a the final results of a Twitter poll showed 57.5% of respondents thought he should step down as the CEO of the social media website.

Twitter polls are not scientific—and they’re said to be easily manipulated by bots—but Musk had nevertheless tweeted at the start of the poll that he would “abide by the results.” He later followed up to indicate that passing the baton may not be so simple. “No one wants the job who can actually keep Twitter alive,” he tweeted in response to a suggestion that he already had a new CEO picked out. “There is no successor.” 

Musk’s preoccupation with Twitter has been a source of increasing frustration for investors in Tesla, where shares are down more than 62% since the start of the year. As Axios reported last month, Musk has already told a Delaware judge that he planned to find someone else to run Twitter “over time.” 

If and when that eventually happens, it’s certain to come as a relief to many Twitter users who are tired of watching Twitter become the main story on Twitter day in and day out. Just over the weekend, the company had instituted a seemingly contradictory restriction on links from competing social networks, only to then delete references to the policy and instead poll users on whether or not such a policy should be instituted.