Elon Musk fires a top Twitter engineer for trivial reasons. The former richest man in the world was annoyed that the engineer said Musk's popularity had declined.
According to a report by Platformer, Musk recently met with several Twitter engineers to discuss the engagement of his tweets which has dropped in recent months.
"This is so ridiculous. I have over 100 million followers, and I only get tens of thousands of impressions," Musk told the employee, as quoted from Insider, Friday (10/2/2023).
The employee then showed internal data and a Google Trends chart that indicated public interest in Musk was steadily declining.
Google Trend data shows Musk's popularity peaked in April 2022, when he made a bid to buy Twitter. His popularity score, which had reached 100 in April, has now fallen to nine.
Twitter engineers previously investigated whether the reach of Musk's tweets had been artificially limited, but they found no evidence that Twitter's algorithms were biased against Musk.
When one of the employees said that Musk's popularity might be starting to decline because the public was no longer interested in his behavior, Musk immediately fired the employee.
The man who also serves as CEO of SpaceX and Tesla also ordered several employees to observe how often his tweets were recommended to other Twitter users.
Twitter itself recently released a view count feature that shows how many times a user's tweet has been viewed. Last week, Musk locked his Twitter account private to see if his tweet view count could increase.
This isn't the first time Musk has fired a Twitter employee without a second thought. Shortly after buying Twitter, Musk fired three employees who criticized his actions on social media.