What’s behind Elon Musk’s talk of stepping down at Twitter?

Please, go. Don’t forget your coat on the way out.

That was the verdict of 57.5 per cent of the roughly 17.5m Twitter users who voted when Elon Musk asked if he should step down as CEO of the platform.

Of course, he’ll still be around as the owner – which should keep journalists happy.

The mercurial businessman, recently knocked off his “world’s richest bro” perch, is a law unto himself. Mostly. The actual law is extraordinarily indulgent of billionaires. They make a mockery of the famous statue that appears with eyes bound outside any number of courthouses around the world. When rich blokes rock up, lady justice takes off her blindfold and says: “I see you’re wealthy. Let’s talk about reducing that sentence, or getting some extra cash out of those rotters at your regulator who’ve been mean to you.”

But even a complaisant justice system can be pushed too far, especially when other rich people are involved. Musk pushed it too far when he tried to back out of a legally-binding offer for Twitter and here we are.

Another group that has been extraordinarily indulgent of him is his investors. But they, too, can be pushed too far. Could they have as much to do with his giving up the job as the users who voted in his Twitter poll? It’s certainly possible.

Tesla shareholders, for example, are paying him $50bn or so for running their electronic car maker. Or they were at one point. The value of Tesla’s stock plays a big role in the value of his package and those shares have recently been falling like a five-year-old on their first trip to an ice rink.

They’re now trading at less than half the heights they reached this time last year. Musk’s remuneration package has already led to a high-profile court case looking at how it came to be approved by Tesla’s board. Even those not involved in it must now be asking whether they’re getting their money’s worth from a man who appears focused on his new toy to the apparent detriment of their company.

Running one big business is quite enough for most CEOs. Musk runs three. The third one, SpaceX, has lately been getting fairly decent PR concerning its launches, which is more than can be said for the other two. Especially Twitter.

Twitter has investors other than Musk too. And lenders. They can’t be much happier than Tesla’s shareholders.

Musk hit the place like a hurricane, sacking half the workforce and warning of sweatshop-like conditions for those who remained. Lawsuits were thrown like confetti. We’ll doubtless be hearing more about them in due course.

Portraying himself as a hero to the cause of free speech, he re-instituted banned accounts but then started suspending others for doing and saying things he didn’t like, such as alerting users to the location of his private jet.

That’s not free speech. It’s doxxing, he claimed. Except that the information was, and is, publicly available and his hissy fit has put millions more eyes on it. For someone as smart and switched-on as Musk must be, he does some remarkably stupid things.

Despite a fortune that was partly built with an online business (one-half of PayPal) and running Twitter, he appears not to have understood the “Streisand effect” – that trying to suppress something inevitably draws more attention to it.

Banning prominent journalists as he did also caused the UN to wag its finger while the EU threatened an investigation. He should be worried about that. The EU is a rare institution that has proved willing to butt heads with big tech and its billionaire oligarchs.

There was also the attempt to ban people posting links to their Mastodon or Facebook profiles and the kerfuffle over charging for the blue ticks some journalists and prominent people like to have. I’ve probably left out at least one or two other Musk-created fusses.

In the meantime, he has resorted to Trump-like tweets touting “record activity” on the site in response to a growing number of gloomy predictions,

You can only imagine what the Qataris (Musk has been in Doha watching the Word Cup) and the Saudis must be thinking about all this given their not-insignificant backing of him. And oh to be a fly on the wall at the next meeting of one of the risk committees of one or two of the banks which ponied up cash to finance his Twitter takeover.

Musk has lately been trawling for new investors to come in at the price he paid. Question: would you want to put your money down after all this?

Some detect a plan. The theory goes like this: Musk never intended to hold on to the job long term. He would go in, shake things up, swing the axe, make some noise, then hand over the reigns to an experienced Silicon Valley hand.

But who on earth would want that job with Musk constantly second-guessing them and breathing down their neck? The answer is that there will be takers if the package is sufficiently bloated.