Millions of Twitter users have voted for Elon Musk to quit as CEO, and he has said he will “abide by” the result.

More than 57 percent of the 17.5 million Twitter users who took part said that the world’s second-richest man should step down as head of the platform.

As the direction of the poll became clear, the shares of his electric car company Tesla went up by 5% before the market opened.

Mr. Musk says he will “abide by the results” of the poll that asked, “Should I step down as head of Twitter?”

The company’s owner, who is also the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, has said in the past that he would eventually step down from the top job. He told a Delaware judge last month that he planned to “spend less time on Twitter and find someone else to run it over time.”

Elon Musk: Twitter users vote in favour of the boss resigning

Musk started the poll soon after attending the World Cup football final between Argentina and France in Qatar on Sunday, where he was photographed with Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.

As the owner, Musk is still responsible for $1 billion in annual interest payments. He did this by giving the company $13 billion in debt to help pay for his purchase of the business. He has been working hard to get the platform’s finances under control and warned last month that Twitter could go bankrupt.

Last week, Jared Birchall, who runs Musk’s family office, went to investors who had helped the billionaire buy Twitter to try to get more money. Birchall offered new shares in the company for $54.20, which is the same price Musk paid to make the company private.

Musk sold another chunk of Tesla stock worth almost $3.6 billion last week. This was his third sale since he said in April that there would be “no more TSLA sales” to support the deal. Tesla’s share price is down more than 60% so far this year, which is worse than Ford and General Motors.

When the results of the Twitter poll came out, shares of Tesla went up 3% before the market opened. Several Tesla investors have complained that Musk has been too busy with his job at Twitter and have asked him to get back to work on the car company.

Musk has been under more and more scrutiny for how he runs the platform since he fired about half of the people who worked there, cut costs, and made some controversial policy changes.

Brands and marketers have left the platform because they are worried about how he will moderate content. This could hurt its $5 billion-a-year business, the majority of which comes from advertising.

In the most recent argument, Musk announced a new policy on Sunday that prevents users from sharing links to their accounts on rival platforms, such as Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook and Instagram, and Mastodon, which is becoming a Twitter competitor.

His critics and even some of his high-profile Silicon Valley supporters said the move was too restrictive. A few hours later, Twitter took down a statement that explained the policy from its website. Musk wrote on Twitter, “Going forward, there will be a vote on major policy changes. My apologies. That won’t happen again.”