Elon Musk launches a poll on Twitter

San Francisco:

Elon Musk expressed his excitement on Saturday as he watched the votes pour in on a Twitter poll he posted on whether to readmit Donald Trump to the messaging platform.

“Reinstate former President Trump,” the billionaire owner of Twitter said on Friday, with a chance to vote up or down.

Reinstate former President Trump

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 19, 2022

At around 3:00 p.m. GMT on Saturday, 52.3% of the nearly 11 million responses favored a return of the former president, who was banned from Twitter for his role in last year’s attack on the Capitol. American by a host of his supporters seeking to overturn the 2020 election results.

Musk said the poll is attracting a million responses one way or another per hour.

“Fascinating to watch the Trump Twitter poll! Musk said Saturday morning in the latest flurry of tweets from the new owner of the one-to-many messaging platform.

There was no indication that the mercurial boss of Space-X and Tesla would buy into the results of the ad hoc poll.

But on Friday, Musk also posted a Latin adage suggesting the decision would be up to Twitter users: “Vox Populi, Vox Dei” (“The voice of the people is the voice of God”).

He has taken similar polls in the past, asking his followers last year if he should sell shares of his electric car company Tesla. As a result of that poll, he sold over $1 billion worth of stock.

Trump, who reveled in using Twitter as his mouthpiece, was followed by more than 88 million users.

He said he would not return to the popular platform but would instead stay on his own network, Truth Social, launched after he was banned from Twitter.

Musk, also CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, has come under fire for sweeping changes at the California company, which he bought less than a month ago for $44 billion.

Since then, he has laid off half of Twitter’s 7,500 employees, abandoned a work-from-home policy and imposed long hours, while his attempts to overhaul the company have faced backlash and delays.

His stumbling attempts to revamp user verification with a controversial subscription service led to a slew of fake accounts and pranks, and prompted major advertisers to walk away from the platform.

On Friday, Musk appeared to go ahead with his plans and reinstated previously banned accounts, including that of comedian Kathy Griffin, which had been deleted after she impersonated him on the site.

The company’s offices were closed on Friday and hundreds of employees quit rather than give in to Musk’s demands to resign themselves to working long, exhausting days on the new Twitter.

(Except for the title, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)