‘You’re Fired!’ Elon Musk Reportedly Sacked One of the Last Top Twitter Engineers For Accurately Explaining Why His Engagement is Plummeting
Billionaire and Twitter owner Elon Musk reportedly fired one of the “company’s two remaining principal engineers” after the engineer explained that his engagement on the platform had dropped not because of a glitch, but due to diminished interest from the public.
Platoformer’s Zoë Schiffer and Casey Newton took a deep dive into Twitter 2.0 and detailed the remarkable story on Thursday.
The journalists wrote that Musk gathered his top remaining personnel in a room and demanded to know why his engagement had plummeted:
“This is ridiculous,” he said, according to multiple sources with direct knowledge of the meeting. “I have more than 100 million followers, and I’m only getting tens of thousands of impressions.”
The engineer, who Musk retaliated against, explained to the billionaire that the dive in engagement was organic and tracked with general disinterest related to him at the moment.
“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,” the Platformer article explained.
“You’re fired, you’re fired,” Musk immediately told the engineer, effectively shooting the messenger.
The article also goes into great detail about the depths of misery at the social media company since Musk’s takeover.
“Where are you interviewing?” and “where do you have offers?” are reportedly standard greetings in the company’s San Francisco headquarters. “ The 8th floor is still stocked with beds, and employees have to reserve them in advance,” the article adds, quoting an overworked employee, saying, “Most weeknights, they are fully booked.”
