More than 10 million votes,or 57.5 per cent,were in favour of Musk stepping down,according to results that came in on Monday morning. Musk committed to abide by the results when he launched the survey,but a day later he had tweeted more than a dozen times without directly addressing the outcome. The search for a new CEO could be drawn out and not yield results quickly,said the person,who asked for anonymity discussing a private matter.

Musk has been almost single-handedly running Twitter since he bought it inOctober for $US44 billion ($65 billion). He said early on that he didn’t plan to stay permanently as CEO and he has surrounded himself with a few trusted people,some of whom have suggested they’d be ready to take on what Musk calls a thankless task. “No one wants the job who can actually keep Twitter alive. There is no successor,” Musk tweeted earlier this week.

Wall Street calls for Musk to step down had been growing for weeks and recently even Tesla bulls have questioned his focus on the social media platform and whether that is distracting him from properly steering the electric vehicle business,where he is central to product design and engineering.

Among those who have remained in Musk’s inner circle are Jason Calacanis,an investor and podcaster,and former PayPal Holdings executive David Sacks. The two were part of Musk’s war room in the days after the deal closed and people familiar with the situation said they were given internal accounts and helped make decisions about who would keep their jobs. Both have been making public suggestions for Twitter’s business strategy.

Calacanis kept his ideas for monetising Twitter coming,advocating on Tuesday for features including a “poll analytics” link where information on Twitter poll results would be broken down by voter attribute,such as country and number of Twitter followers. Such insights are “well worth paying for,” he tweeted. On Monday,he talked up Twitter’s new business branding efforts.