After Elon Musk was told to hit the bricks in his own Twitter poll last week, we debated whether he would ignore the results or carry through with his promise to “abide by the results.” Yesterday we got the answer to that question… sort of. I had speculated that he could postpone his departure as CEO for a lengthy period, step down quickly, or shutter the website entirely. Based on a report from an unnamed source inside the company, Musk is planning something that combines a couple of those options. A report from CNBC claims that Musk is “actively looking” for a new CEO to replace him. How long that search could take remains unknown at this time. But if and when he does “step aside,” he won’t be gone from the scene. Even if he’s not technically the CEO anymore, Musk will reportedly still be directing software development, security, or other functions, so he won’t disappear entirely.

Billionaire Elon Musk is “actively looking” for a new CEO at Twitter after users voted for him to step down from running the social media site, according to a report Tuesday.

Musk, who has served as Twitter CEO since buying the company for $44 billion in late October, is looking at potential candidates to be his permanent successor, CNBC’s David Faber reported, citing unnamed sources.

“No big surprise here — Musk is actively looking for a new CEO of Twitter. It doesn’t take a genius to tell you that,” Faber said on “Squawk Box” on Tuesday morning. “As we’ve seen from his previous polls, oftentimes he sort of already knows the answer before he actually asks people to participate in said poll.”

“From everything I have heard, he has been actively looking, asking, trying to figure out who the candidate pool might actually be,” Faber added.

Assuming this report is accurate, this would be something of a reversal for Musk. Keep in mind that he tweeted a statement on Friday night saying “there is no successor.”

Some names have already been floated as potential replacements, including David Sacks and Sriram Krishnan. Over the weekend, Jason Calacanis tweeted his own poll asking whether people would prefer Sacks, himself, or a combination of the two. The winner of that poll (by almost ten points) was “other.”

If this is indeed how it plays out, I doubt that things will change very much at Twitter. Musk will no doubt pick someone who shares his own vision for the company rather than pushing to take Twitter in yet another entirely different direction. And while officially stepping aside will free up some of Elon’s time to see to his other projects at SpaceX, Tesla, and his other ventures, he’ll still be calling the shots in the background. Being the CEO of a large company comes with a lot of power and responsibility, but it doesn’t mean that you get to override the decisions of the owner.

The CNBC report suggests that Elon Musk already knew he would lose in the poll before he posted it. That part doesn’t ring true to me. Musk obviously has a massive ego (not that there’s anything wrong with that) and  I’m guessing he thought that his supporters would show up more strongly to support his anti-censorship efforts. Keep in mind that he didn’t tweet a single thing about the poll for days after it closed. If he was “planning” on losing, he could have signaled that on Saturday morning.

In the end, this might wind up being the best possible outcome for Musk, however. He already had a lot on his plate before taking over Twitter and there are plenty of projects for him to oversee. SpaceX alone should be enough to keep any CEO busy. They’ve been setting records for the most spaceflights by any organization this year, and his “starship” is preparing for its first orbital flight soon.

The bottom line here is that Twitter likely won’t be going away, or at least not in the immediate future. And Musk’s free speech campaign will likely continue as well. Hopefully, by the time we reach the end of the Twitter Files, he will have finished nailing down the lid of the coffin on the FBI.