The company’s top engineer was let go by Twitter CEO Elon Musk due to his diminishing reach, according to the press. According to The Verge, Elon Musk last week kept his account private for one day to explore if that would enhance the size of his audience. The move was made in response to complaints from numerous well-known right-wing accounts that Musk interacts with regarding Twitter’s recent changes reducing their reach.
Elon Musk assembled a group of engineers and advisors in a room at Twitter’s headquarters on Tuesday in search of solutions. According to many sources with firsthand knowledge of the meeting, he said, “This is crazy.” I’m only receiving tens of thousands of impressions despite having more than 100 million followers.
According to the story, “one of the company’s two remaining principal engineers suggested a possible explanation for Musk’s dwindling reach: public interest in his antics is waning little under a year after the Tesla CEO made his unexpected attempt to buy Twitter for $44 billion.”
Employees displayed a Google Trends chart and internal data about Musk’s account engagement. They told him that in April of last year, Musk’s search popularity had reached its “peak,” as indicated by a score of “100.” He currently has a score of 9, though.
Previously, engineers investigated if Musk’s reach had been deliberately constrained, but they were unable to uncover any evidence that the algorithm was prejudiced against him. You’re fired, you’re fired, Elon Musk warned the engineer after not taking the news well.
A current employee claims that Musk, who is unhappy with the engineers’ present work, has instructed staff to keep track of how often each of his tweets is suggested.
In the meantime, the microblogging service experienced a worldwide outage on Thursday, affecting users in India as well, and it appears that an employee destroyed data for an internal program that regulates Twitter usage rates. According to the report, the staff who worked on that service left the company in November of last year.
