Elon Musk fired a top Twitter engineer due to a drop in the popularity of his own tweets

For several weeks, Elon Musk has been worried about how many people see his tweets. Last week, he made his account private for a day to see if it could increase his audience. The move comes after several prominent accounts that Musk interacts with complained that recent Twitter changes had reduced their reach.

Last Tuesday, Musk gathered a group of engineers and advisers in a room at Twitter’s headquarters to find an answer to the question of why his number of followers is falling.

“This is ridiculous,” he said, according to multiple sources with direct knowledge of the meeting. “I have more than 100 million followers, but I only get tens of thousands of views.”

One of the company’s two remaining chief engineers offered a possible explanation: a little less than a year after Tesla’s CEO made a surprise offer to buy Twitter for $44 billion, people’s interest in his antics is waning.

Employees showed Musk internal data about interactions with his account, as well as Google Trends graph. In April of last year, according to them, Musk was at the peak of popularity in the search rankings, as evidenced by the indicator “100”. Today he has 9 points. Engineers previously investigated whether Musk’s reach was somehow artificially limited, but found no evidence that the algorithm was biased against him. Musk did not take this news very well and immediately told one of the engineers that he was fired.

Dissatisfied with the work of the engineers, Musk instructed employees to track how many times each of his tweets was recommended.

It’s been seven weeks since Twitter added a view count for each tweet. At the time, Musk promised that this feature would give the world a better idea of how dynamic the platform is.

Almost two months later, however, the view count showed the opposite effect, highlighting how little engagement most posts received relative to the size of their audience. At the same time, according to the data from one recent research, Twitter usage in the US has dropped by nearly 9% since Musk bought the company.

Sources at Twitter say that the view-counting feature itself can contribute to a decrease in engagement and therefore the number of views. Like and Retweet buttons have been shrunk to accommodate viewing views, making them harder to click.

An even more obvious reason for the decrease in activity is the increasingly frequent failures of Twitter, which confuse users with the disappearance of mentions, changing algorithmic priorities and tweets from accounts they don’t follow.

On Wednesday, the company suffered one of its first major outages since Musk took over, when users were told, without explanation, “You are over the daily limit for sending tweets.” It turns out that the employee had inadvertently enabled internal code that sets limits on Twitter usage. The team that worked on this service left the company in November.

Musk’s product feedback, which mostly come in the form of replies to his tweets, often confuse his employees.

“There’s times he’s just awake late at night and says all sorts of things that don’t make sense,” one employee said. “And then he’ll come to us and be like, ‘this one person says they can’t do this one thing on the platform,’ and then we have to run around chasing some outlier use case for one person. It doesn’t make any sense.”

The San Francisco headquarters, whose landlord sued Twitter for non-payment of rent, has a melancholy air. When people pass each other in the hallways, the standard greeting is “where are you interviewing?” The eighth floor is still stocked with beds, and workers have to reserve them in advance.

When Musk or his subordinates ask questions, employees are torn between the right answer and the safe answer.

Despite all the upheaval, employees who remain say that what they call “Twitter 2.0” is better than its predecessor, at least in some ways.

“In the past, Twitter operated too often by committees that went nowhere,” one employee said. “I do appreciate the fact that if you want to do something that you think will improve something, you generally have license to do it. But that’s a double edged sword — moving that fast can lead to unintended consequences.”

The employee cites the example of Twitter Blue’s disastrous relaunch, which resulted in brands receiving fake pages and dozens of top advertisers leaving the platform.

As Musk continues to impulsively fire people, these teams were disbanded and their work transferred to other already overburdened teams, which often have little idea of the new assignments.