Elon Musk reportedly fired a top Twitter engineer for explaining away the reasons for the CEO’s declining tweet views. The unexpected move came when Musk called his engineers and demanded to know why the number of people seeing his tweets reduced. He even reportedly took his Twitter account private last week for one day to test its popularity, Platformer reports.
According to insiders, Musk complained that he had more than 100 million Twitter followers and that it was ridiculous that he recently began to get only tens of thousands of impressions. He told his top engineers and advisors on Tuesday to get to the root of the problem. His team pulled out internal engagement data for his account as well as a Google Trends chart to analyze the problem.
The analysts disclosed that the Twitter algorithm had not been tweaked to work against him in any way and that his search engine rankings dropped to 9 from the 100 it was last April. One of the two remaining principal engineers told him that his popularity on the Internet was at 100 when he first offered to acquire Twitter for $44 billion in April, but it dropped after the acquisition because the public had seen all the antics he could ramp up.
“You’re fired, you’re fired,” Musk told the engineer.
Nearly two months ago, Musk asked his employees to put public view counts for every tweet so that he can accurately gauge the engagement of people on the platform. He opined that most Twitter users read tweets but do not tweet themselves or reply to or like tweets to boost engagement. Funny enough, the data showed that the new platform owner was correct; many people had left Twitter since he purchased it and the few left hardly engage with it in any significant way.
One employee even complained that workers are now burdened to carry on the jobs of thousands of employees who were fired earlier this year. He said Musk himself is confused with no clear strategic leadership, yet he wants employees to perform magic with obviously impossible requests. He added that many remaining staffers are looking for ways to exit the company and that some are already attending secret interviews already.
“We haven’t seen much in the way of longer-term, cogent strategy,” the employee said. “Most of our time is dedicated to three main areas: putting out fires (mostly caused by firing the wrong people and trying to recover from that), performing impossible tasks, and ‘improving efficiency’ without clear guidelines of what the expected end results are. We mostly move from dumpster fire to dumpster fire, from my perspective.”
Then another employee went on to fire a salvo:
“If Elon can learn how to put a bit more thought into some of the decisions, and fire from the hip a bit less, it might do some good,” the employee said. “He needs to learn the areas where he just does not know things and let those that do know to take over. He really doesn’t like to believe that there is anything in technology that he doesn’t know, and that’s frustrating. You can’t be the smartest person in the room about everything, all the time.”