According to a report from tech newsletter Platformer, Elon Musk fired a top Twitter engineer after seeking answers as to why his engagement on the platform is dropping.
Last week, the Twitter CEO made his Twitter account private for a day to test if it would boost his reach after several prominent right-wing accounts complained that recent changes to Twitter had reduced their reach. “This is ridiculous,” Musk said according to sources with direct knowledge of the meeting. “I have more than 100 million followers, and I’m only getting tens of thousands of impressions.
From Platformer: One of the company’s two remaining principal engineers offered a possible explanation for Musk’s declining reach: just under a year after the Tesla CEO made his surprise offer to buy Twitter for $44 billion, public interest in his antics is waning.
Employees showed Musk internal data regarding engagement with his account, along with a Google Trends chart. Last April, they told him, Musk was at “peak” popularity in search rankings, indicated by a score of “100.” Today, he’s at a score of nine. Engineers had previously investigated whether Musk’s reach had somehow been artificially restricted, but found no evidence that the algorithm was biased against him.
Musk did not take the news well.
“You’re fired, you’re fired,” Musk told the engineer. (Platformer is withholding the engineer’s name in light of the harassment Musk has directed at former Twitter employees.)
Read the full report over at Platformer.
