Twitter’s CEO isn’t happy that his tweets aren’t as visible as they used to be, claims a new report, and has demanded employees explain why their engagement is down—and fired them when they do. do not like explanations.
Elon Musk called a meeting Tuesday with the social media platform’s top engineers to demand an explanation, it was reported Platformer, newsletter from tech reporters Casey Newton and Zoë Schiffer.
“I have over 100 million followers, and I’ve only got tens of thousands of impressions,” Musk said at the meeting, according to the report, citing several unidentified meeting participants.
One of the engineers reportedly tried to answer Musk’s question by sharing data from Google Trends, which showed that search interest for “Elon Musk” peaked last April, when the billionaire first announced his interest in buying Twitter.
Google Trends gave April a peak score of ‘100’. As of February 10, the score is now a ’10’. According to the tracking website, interest in “Elon Musk” recovered slightly in October, with a score of around ’30’ when Musk took control of the company. Interest began to decline.
Musk reportedly didn’t take the news well, telling the employee — one of two key engineers at the company — “you’re fired.”
Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The company reportedly no longer has a communications department to handle press requests.
How popular is Elon Musk?
Musk is one of the most followed Twitter accounts, with 128 million followers. Tweets from the CEO of Tesla, Twitter and SpaceX regularly get millions, if not tens of millions, of views according to data the website shows.
That’s more than any other account, even from a celebrity or other public figure. (For example, tweets from former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates, with meh 62 million followersrarely break a million views.) But even tens of millions of views represent a fraction of Musk’s total follower count.
Musk regularly tweets memes and jokes from the account, which can explain the relatively greater engagement compared to other sedate accounts of public officials, celebrities and company leaders. And Musk has argued that his massive Twitter presence is an asset to other businesses, telling analysts last month that the feed is an “incredibly powerful tool to drive demand for Tesla.”
Twitter began displaying view counts in late December. At the time, Musk said that the number of views “shows that Twitter is more alive than it seems, because more than 90% of Twitter users read, but do not tweet, reply, or like.” Musk tweeted announcement it has been viewed 56.5 million times, according to Twitter’s view count. Twitter’s website says the view count includes any time a logged-in user views a tweet.
Last week, Musk created a personal account to test claims from conservative commentators who said the move increased engagement. Only followers can see tweets from private accounts, and no one else can share them. Musk later admit that the test “helps identify some problems with the system.”
Twitter suffered a major outage on Wednesday, as users were blocked from tweeting, sending direct messages or following new accounts, with some saying they had exceeded their “daily limit.” Musk told employees in an internal email to pause “new feature development” and focus on “system stability and robustness, especially with the Super Bowl coming up.”
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