Elon Musk Fired His Top Twitter Engineer Because His Tweets Aren't Getting Traction Anymore
Platformer - On Tuesday, Musk gathered a group of engineers and advisors into a room at Twitter’s headquarters looking for answers. Why are his engagement numbers tanking?
“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.”
One of the company’s two remaining principal engineers offered a possible explanation for Musk’s declining reach: just under a year after the Tesla CEO made his surprise offer to buy Twitter for $44 billion, public interest in his antics is waning.
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.
Musk did not take the news well.
“You’re fired, you’re fired,” Musk told the engineer.
$44 billion for Twitter did not make sense to me then, and it doesn't make sense to me now. It must be awesome to be Elon and have that much money to spend mostly as a prank, but my god, $44 billion for an app that everyone hates is so outrageous. And I mean that. I don't know any active users of Twitter that actually enjoy using Twitter.
It's pretty twisted- the more followers you gain on it, the more you resent it. Why? Because of trolls, obviously. They are the accounts that love Twitter, the nameless, faceless accounts that just tweet hateful shit all day every day to anyone they disagree with. So the bigger you are on Twitter, the more hate you read. It's the modern day "mo money, mo problems". But the issue with Twitter is you can't even monetize it for yourself. We at Barstool get emails all the time saying "Twitter makes Barstool zero dollars, stop tweeting all day every day". It's truly a dying app as far as I can tell, but Elon wanted to play God so he purchased it and now he can't believe nobody gives a fuck anymore. It's so poetic because if you've ever been on Twitter, you know people move to the next story in .5 seconds. Him buying Twitter was the hot topic for a few days, and then we moved on to whatever next stupid story happened. Whoops.
So what was Elon's solution? Fire his engineer, of course! Elon cracks me up because it's like he's cosplaying as a CEO. Like, he imagines how a CEO in a TV show about Elon would act, and then he does that. "You're fire, you're fired", nailed it, Elon tells himself as more and more people continue to not care about him anymore. I mean shit, this story is the first I saw his name in the news in a few weeks and I'm one of the last people who mindlessly scrolls that stupid fucking app all day. That's how you know it's bad.
I don't thinkkkkkk we'll be a Twitter-less world soon, but do we truly believe people will still be Tweeting 10 or 20 years from now? I don't see it. Hopefully we all wake up and come to our senses that there is much more to life than arguing online. What's crazy to me though is when I get a tweet like "kill yourself" or "fuck you I fucking hate your guts", I used to take it personally. Now it's more the opposite, like "how insane is it that there's a real life person sitting behind their phone or laptop, using their time in the world to send that tweet to ME"? It's one of the more crazy phenomenons of the world, and I'm curious how much staying power it truly has.