Elon Musk posts on Weibo about how action matters more than words and gets an earful from disgruntled Chinese netizens

Twitter and Tesla boss Elon Musk has posted on his Chinese Weibo account for the first time in four weeks, after promising to step down as chief executive of the US social media platform once he identifies a successor.

The 51-year-old billionaire posted a line on Weibo in both English and Chinese on Wednesday that said “caring more about words than actions does not bode well for civilisation”, without any context. Musk posted the same line on his Twitter account as a response to a story about Stanford University’s harmful language list.

The Twitter CEO recently conducted a poll on whether he should step down as head of Twitter, resulting in 17.5 million votes and a 57.5 per cent vote for “yes”. Musk said on Tuesday he would resign as soon as he finds “someone foolish enough to take the job” and he would concentrate on running the company’s software and server teams afterwards.

Musk’s fresh Weibo post resulted in hundreds of posts by Chinese netizens questioning the wisdom of Musk’s move to buy Twitter in the first place, and complaints about Tesla vehicles. Musk set up his Weibo account in 2014 and has over 2 million followers, and he typically posts about Tesla’s progress and topics related to renewable energy and artificial intelligence.

“What’s the purpose of buying Twitter then? Since it’s all words there,” said one Weibo user with the handle “Tianjinfan 1952”.