Elon Musk’s obsession with getting his tweets visible cost an engineer his job

Elon Musk would have fired a Twitter engineer, guilty of having accused the billionaire of “not being as popular as it once was”. The impertinent response would have been pronounced after the new Twitter CEO was angry because his posts on the social network are no longer as viral as they used to be.

The news was announced by The Platformer, a magazine, and newsletter founded by former The Verge journalist Casey Newstat.

The billionaire would have repeatedly asked a team of engineers why his posts no longer get the visibility they had until a few months ago.

The portrait that emerges from The Platformer’s report is not flattering and describes an Elon Musk obsessed with the performance of his Twitter posts. The billionaire, explains the magazine, would have repeatedly asked a team of engineers why his posts no longer get the visibility they had until a few months ago. “I have over 100 million followers , but some posts are seen by a few tens of thousands of people,” he allegedly said, ordering the developer team to find a solution. Musk had also recently set his account settings to “Private”, making his posts visible only to followers. An experiment, he explained a few days later, to see if this gimmick was able to increase the organic visibility of his tweets.

According to The Platformer, Elon Musk hired a handful of Twitter employees to monitor and track the progress of his posts

According to The Platformer, Elon Musk has commissioned a handful of Twitter employees to monitor and track the progress of his posts, taking into account all the times the social network’s algorithms recommend his tweets.

Exasperated by the billionaire’s constant requests, one of the engineers would then have explained to Elon Musk that there are no factors that indicate that the social network’s algorithm is not working as it should, adding that the only reason why his posts – even though they are seen by millions and commented on by hundreds of thousands of users – no longer getting the traction they once did because the billionaire alienated some of his supporters after acquiring Twitter and making several controversial decisions. The answer was not appreciated: according to the report of the magazine, Musk would have ordered the engineer not to show up at the workplace anymore.