Elon Musk says he will step down as chief executive of Twitter after a replacement is found.

"I will resign as CEO as soon as I find someone foolish enough to take the job! After that, I will just run the software & servers teams," Mr Musk wrote on Twitter.

This is the first time Mr Musk has mentioned stepping down as chief of the social media platform, after Twitter users voted decisively in a poll for him to step down, which the billionaire launched on Monday.

Wall Street calls for Mr 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.

Mr Musk has himself admitted he had too much on his plate, and said he would look for a Twitter CEO.

He said that there was no successor and that "no one wants the job who can actually keep Twitter alive."

Since taking over the San Francisco-based company in late October, Mr Musk's run as CEO has been marked by quickly issued rules and policies that have often been withdrawn or changed soon after being made public.

Some of Mr Musk's actions have unnerved Twitter advertisers and turned off users.

They have included laying off half of Twitter's workforce, letting go contract content moderators and disbanding a council of trust and safety advisers that the company formed in 2016 to address hate speech, child exploitation, suicide, self-harm and other problems on the platform.

Former Twitter employees launch legal action

Meanwhile, Twitter has been accused by 100 former employees of various legal violations stemming from Mr Musk's takeover of the company.

Shannon Liss-Riordan, a lawyer for the workers, said she had filed 100 demands for arbitration against Twitter that make similar claims to four class action lawsuits pending in California federal court.

The workers all signed agreements to bring legal disputes against the company in arbitration rather than court, Ms Liss-Riordan said, which means they will likely be barred from participating in the class actions.

Twitter laid off roughly 3,700 employees in early November in a cost-cutting measure by Mr Musk, who paid $US44 billion to acquire the social media platform, and hundreds more subsequently resigned.