What Elon Musk likes is that people talk about him and not go unnoticed. Be in the limelight. This consideration is not free if one takes into account that the owner of Twitter fired one of the engineers, one of the most important on the platform, because he informed him that his popularity was declining on his own social network.
This was advanced by Platformer, a technological site with great infiltration into the inner life of Twitter and which has the best intramural information of this company. The “you’re fired” came live and direct, in the course of a meeting that Musk called on Tuesday with his engineering team. The matter to be dealt with was to address the number of views of his tweets, in a deep downward spiral in recent months, which, for the owner, was absolutely impossible.
This concern about how many people saw his tweets had already been expressed by the self-proclaimed “chief tweeter” in previous days. The company’s chief executive made his account private last week for a day to test whether that could increase his audience size. The experiment came after several prominent right-wing users complained that recent changes to Twitter had reduced the impact of their accounts.
Musk assigned a group of employees to review whether, in his specific case, the scope of his account had been restricted due to issues with the Twitter algorithm.
“This is ridiculous,” he told the workers present at the meeting on Tuesday, always from Platformer, which cited several sources with direct knowledge of the meeting. “I have over a hundred million followers and only get a few tens of thousands of impressions,” he lamented.
The employees showed internal data and Google charts on trends indicating that public interest in the millionaire and founder of Tesla or Space X was fading. Those graphs showed that his popularity skyrocketed last April, a time that coincided with the offer he made to buy Twitter. In a quantified way, he climbed to 100 then and has since fallen to 9.
When one of the engineers claimed that it was all because Musk’s popularity could be declining due to a lack of public interest after the purchase of the social network was executed, the boss replied that he was fired, according to Platformer.
He also ordered employees to track how often their tweets are recommended on the site, demonstrating their dissatisfaction with the engineers’ work and their lack of conviction in the point of view expressed in the technical meeting.
It is not the first time that Musk orders the settlement on site. He fired three engineers who criticized him on social media just weeks after the $44 billion acquisition closed in late October.
Twitter usage is down around 10% since the billionaire took over the platform, which is partly attributed to multiple malfunctions. The most notorious last one was registered this Wednesday, which left users without the ability to send or receive messages while the company tried to introduce various new features.
