We re-ran Elon Musk’s Twitter poll with an unbiased survey panel and surprisingly 69% of the panel agreed, Elon Musk should sell 10% of his Tesla stock.
In early November Elon Musk sent out a Twitter poll asking if he should sell 10% of his tesla stock. Musk Tweeted “Much is made lately of unrealized gains being a means of tax avoidance, so I propose selling 10% of my Tesla stock. Do you support this?”
His poll closed with 58 percent of respondents voting in favor of him selling from 3.5 million responses. The large sample size comes from his over 65 million followers and fans.
Poll the People conducted independent research with the goal to eliminate Elon Musk’s loyal followers and find unbiased results to his question. Poll the People sets out to make better decisions with real data-backed responses – in minutes, not days. Part of the issue with the Twitter poll is Musk asks if his followers, fans, and supporters agree with him, creating biases and affecting the reliability of his poll. The impactful question comes amongst Musk’s meme-heavy feed creating uncertainty about the results. While Musk tweeted in response to his poll “I will abide by the results of this poll, whichever way it goes.” It is still unclear when Musk is serious or trolling when asking such an important questions.
The poll, conducted fast and effectively on our micro-survey platform agreed with the results of Musk’s poll with a higher percentage of voters choosing “Yes”. Surprisingly, there was a larger percentage of participants supporting the sale with 69 percent of the unbiased survey panel agree that Musk should sell his stock, supporting his poll results. Much of the panel was concerned about billionaires paying taxes, expressing that Musk should pay taxes on his assets, just like everyone else. While the results of this poll do not affect Elon’s decision the nature of the quick, clear, and unbiased results provide a more reliable platform for decision making.
Owen is a digital marketer at Poll the People an emerging user research and usability testing platform. Owen focuses on content creation and moving Poll the People forward through all digital marketing mediums. He is a graduate from Bryant University with a concentration in marketing, living in Boston.