Elon Musk, chief executive officer of Tesla Inc., arrives at court in San Francisco, California, US, ... [+]
Twitter accounts with large followings have reported much less engagement on the social media platform in recent months, a problem that CEO Elon Musk said he would investigate and report back to users. But it sounds like Musk didn’t get the answer he wanted, even firing an engineer who gave the billionaire bad news about engagement on the site, according to a new report from tech news site Platformer.
“They've screwed up the algorithms so much on @Twitter that everyone is completely invisible and engagements are almost down to nothing. It's almost not worth being on here anymore,” conservative commentator Catturd2 tweeted late last month.
“This shouldn't be hard. Take the F-king algorithms and shadowbans off so we can see each other!” Catturd2 continued.
Musk reportedly gathered engineers into a meeting on Tuesday to address this issue, according to Platformer, and Musk asked what was going on, calling the problem “ridiculous.”
“I have more than 100 million followers, and I’m only getting tens of thousands of impressions,” Musk reportedly said.
But the engineers didn’t know what to tell him. They had apparently looked at the data and couldn’t find any technical reason why engagement was way down for big accounts. One senior engineer floated that perhaps people were getting tired of the constant drama that surrounded Musk in the first two months of his ownership of Twitter. Musk bought the company in late October 2022 for $44 billion and seemed to make news every day during that tumultuous period—whether it was firing thousands of staff, trying to coax some staff back after realizing he needed them, or even getting viciously booed at a Dave Chappelle comedy show by a Bay Area crowd.
The engineers even showed how Musk’s name had dropped in the Google Trends rankings, peaking last year, and now dwindling as the public grew tired of the billionaire’s antics, according to Platformer. But Musk was not happy with that response. It must be the algorithms. And any other explanation was unacceptable.
Musk, who seemingly wants little more in life than to be adored by millions of fans, fired the engineer on the spot, according to Platformer, opting to shoot the messenger rather than face an unpleasant truth.
Maybe Twitter employees will learn their lesson. You can bet the next person that Musk poses a question to will come up with an answer that pleases the CEO, even if it’s a lie. Their job seems to depend on it.
