On Tuesday, Twitter users wondered why their timelines were showing so many tweets from Elon Musk. Now, a new report offers a reason: Elon Musk is upset that his tweet about the Super Bowl got less than one from US President Joe Biden.
The Twitter CEO is flying private jet from the Super Bowl in Phoenix to the Bay Area Sunday night to complain about relatively low tweet engagement, reports Platformer, newsletter from tech reporters Zoë Schiffer and Casey Newton. After Musk ordered employees to fix the problem, Twitter engineers let Musk’s tweets pass the platform’s algorithm to determine the best content for users, landing Musk’s posts at the top of users’ feeds.
Biden’s tweet about the Super Bowl – where is the president cheering for Philadelphia Eagles because of his wife’s relationship with the city-now 29 million views. Elon Musk deleted a tweet supporting the Eagles after the loss, but the tweet received about 9 million views, according to the report Platformer.
On Tuesday, users on Twitter reported seeing more tweets from Musk in the “For You” tab, which shows tweets to users based on their interests, including from accounts they don’t follow. (The “Following” tab of the platform only shows the tweets, in reverse chronological order, from the accounts of the users they follow).
Musk’s flood of tweets was an intentional consequence of Twitter’s algorithm changes, Platformer report. The company ordered 80 engineers to improve Musk’s involvement; the team that allows the CEO’s tweets to skirt the safeguards that prevent one user’s tweets from dominating all people’s feeds.
(Musk first humor about too many tweets on people’s accounts, then said Twitter would make “adjustment” for that system.)
Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The company no longer has a communications department to handle media inquiries.
last thursday, Platformer reported that Musk was increasingly concerned about the low engagement of his tweets. In a meeting to discuss the reasons why, one of the company’s top engineers tried to explain that interest in Musk is declining in general, using a graph from Google Trends tracking searches for “Elon Musk” as evidence.
Musk reportedly fired the engineer on the spot.
Musk’s deputy then told the engineer that he would be fired if he didn’t resolve the issue of Musk’s slumping engagement, according to the report Platformer.
Elon Musk has one of the most followed platform accounts, with 128 million followers. By comparison, Biden’s official Twitter account has 29.5 million followers.
The US president has long angered Musk, who believes the White House is underestimating Tesla’s track record in manufacturing electric vehicles over legacy automakers like GM.
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