Since his acquisition of Twitter in late October, tech billionaire Elon Musk has been irrational about his actions, particularly with regard to his decisions regarding layoffs. Recent reports cite that Musk fired another Twitter engineer simply because the techie could not provide a satisfactory answer as to why his tweet engagement had dropped drastically.
Apparently, several prominent right-wingers have raised that their reach has been significantly reduced following recent changes to Twitter. Earlier this month, right-wing commentator Ian Miles Cheong tweeted that a tweet he sent when his account was set to private had a far greater reach than the same tweet posted when his account was public.
Describing it as ‘extremely worrying’, Musk took his account private to test it and later admitted there were “some issues with the system”. He also informed that the company will address it next week.
Then on Tuesday, he assembled a group of engineers and consultants looking for an explanation as to why his engagement numbers had dropped drastically. “It’s ridiculous,” he said, as quoted by ledge, “I have over 100 million followers, and I’m only getting tens of thousands of impressions.”
Citing related data, one of the chief engineers tried to explain that public interest in his antics was waning after his surprise offer to buy Twitter for $44 billion.
They produced internal data regarding engagement and Google Trends charts that clearly showed Musk was at “peak” popularity in search rankings in April 2022, indicated by a score of “100”. Today he is on the score of nine. The engineers also reported that they tried to check whether Musk’s access had been artificially restricted but found no such indication.
Musk denied this and fired him. Musk told the engineer, “You’re fired, you’re fired.”
Since the $44 billion acquisition, Musk has come under fire for several of his policies. He has focused on reducing costs by laying off half the staff and introducing new plans for the Twitter Blue subscription service, which offers sought-after “Verified” badges.
He said the move was necessary to justify the costly acquisition.
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